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A COMPARATIVE ESTIMATE 



OF 



MODERN ENGLISH POETS 



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JP DEVEY, M.A., 

OF THE INNER TEMPLE, BARRISTER-AT-LAW. 



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LONDON: 

E. M.OXON, SON, AND CO., 

I, AMEN CORNER, PATERNOSTER ROW. 
1873. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I. 
UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE IN ART . . . ..I 

CHAPTER II. 
PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. .... 6 

CHAPTER III. 
CLASSIFICATION OF THE POETS . . . -37 

CHAPTER IV. 
INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERISTICS . . . -56 



CHAPTER V. 
ENGLISH SCHOOLS OF POETRY. . 



65 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER VI. 

GENERAL FEATURES OF THE LAKE SCHOOL 



THE LAKE POETS : — 

WORDSWORTH 
COLERIDGE. 
SOUTHEY. . 



CHAPTER VII. 



87 
104 
112 



CHAPTER VIII. 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL : — 



GIFFORD . 

ROGERS 

CAMPBELL . 

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 



136 
145 
I 5 6 
166 



CHAPTER IX. 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL :- 

BYRON 
SCOTT 
MOORE 



184 
212 

226 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER X. 

ALEXANDRINE POETS | 

SHELLEY ...... 239 

KEATS ....... 263 



CHAPTER XL 
THE ART SCHOOL : — 

TENNYSON ..... 275 



CHAPTER XII. 
ANDROTHEIST SCHOOL : — 

SWINBURNE . , . . -337 



CHAPTER XIII. 

POETS OF THE AFFECTIONS : — 

MONTGOMERY ..... 355 

LONGFELLOW ..... 360 

CHAPTER XIV. 

REALISTIC SCHOOL : — 

CRABBE ...... 368 

BROWNING ...... 3.76 



V 



COMPARATIVE ESTIMATE OF MODERN 
ENGLISH POETS. 



CHAPTER I. 
UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE IN ART. 

HAZLITT says that the principle of universal suffrage 
is all very well in matters of political government, 
which affect the common interests of society, but is not in the 
least applicable to matters of taste, which can only be decided 
by the most refined understandings.* But, in the affairs 
of Parnassus, the judgments of the refined will often be found 
indisputably wrong, and those of the commonalty as indis- 
putably right. Quinctilian thought that the " Argonautics " of 
Apollonius was a performance of a very high order of merit ; 
but the great mass of his countrymen invariably deemed it, 
what it unquestionably is, a performance of a very low order of 
merit. It cannot be denied that Queen Caroline was a lady 
of strong intellectual predilections ; at least so say Clarke and 
Leibnitz ; yet Stephen Duck was her favourite poet. Akenside 
and Warton were, probably, the most refined writers of their 
age. Yet Akenside thought so highly of Dyer's long since 
forgotten "Fleece," as to accept the light in which it was 
regarded by the public, as a test of the poetical qualities of the 
age. The lofty opinion which Warton had of the miserable 

* "Round Table," vol. ii., p. 260. 

I 



2 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Elegiacs of Hammond, was hardly surpassed by his admiration 
of Gray. It is only the other day a wretched rhymester 
of Westmoreland was recommended by some of the foremost 
occupants of the episcopal bench, and two or three noble 
lords of acknowledged literary taste, to the crown, for a pension, 
as possessing merit on a level with Burns. We also know 
that a beardless youth, at the end of last century, succeeded' 
in palming off on the elite of London fashionable society, his 
stupid " Vortigern," for a genuine play of Shakespeare, until the 
representation of the piece, when both pit and gallery laughed 
it out of Covent Garden. Yet, Pye, the laureate of those 
days, wrote the prologue to the play, and Parr and Boswell, 
with a host of other literary celebrities, were vouchers for its 
authenticity. A few years earlier than this freak of young 
Ireland's, there died in the same year two Scotch poets, whose 
fame, while living, is now generally admitted to have been in 
inverse proportion to their merits. One was carried by torch- 
light, beneath nodding plumes, in solemn state, to Westminster 
Abbey. The other was laid, by an awkward squad of brother 
yeomen, beneath .a mound of turf in the quiet churchyard of 
Dumfries. To name Macpherson now as possessing gifts at 
all akin with the national minstrel of Scotland, would be 
deemed a sorry exhibition of taste. Yet there cannot be 
a doubt that, a century ago, Burns was comparatively obscure, 
while his more fortunate rival blazed in the poetical firmament, 
as a star of the first magnitude. We are not at all sure that, 
in the sphere of poetry, had universal suffrage been adopted 
at the close of last century, it would not have led us to truer 
results, than a suffrage based upon the possession of a certain 
quantum of refined judgment in the upper classes of society. 
For, while Macpherson was feted as a literary genius by the 
first circles in London, Burns was allowed to pass his best 
years as a mere gauger of whiskey barrels, in an obscure corner 
of a Scotch province. 

So far, then, as the reputation of a poet is concerned, we 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE IN ART. 



should be even more inclined to rest our judgment on the inde- 
pendent opinion of the commonalty, than upon that of any 
distinct section of the upper ten thousand, no matter however 
refined that section may be. For, poetry is an art connected 
with the delineation of human passions and feelings ; and of 
the truth of that delineation, the greater the number of judges, 
the more likely are we to arrive at a correct result. Moliere is 
said to have read over his plays to his maid-servant, and always 
found that her judgment anticipated the degree of success 
awarded by the public. And we do not doubt he was right. 

Painting requires an educated eye, music a disciplined ear ; 
but poetry, diving to the bottom of the heart, which each one 
carries about with him, represents its sorrows and its joys, its 
hopes and fears. The circle of judges may therefore be pro- 
portionally enlarged, till it becomes commensurate with all 
who are in any way masters of the language in which the repre- 
sentation is conveyed. Those who possess a knowledge of the 
poet's words, are like the holders of a galvanic wire down 
which the stream of his thoughts flow, affecting each alike with 
the impression of his burning images, at least so far as the 
recipients of the poetic battery are possessed of a common 
organization. 

" One touch of nature makes the whole world kin ; " 

and the soundest, if not the only practical test, we can have of 
the genuineness of the touch, is the beating of the general bosom 
in common sympathy with it. But the opinion of the commonalty, 
to be of any worth, ought to be exercised upon matters which 
appeal to the general feelings, and under certain conditions 
which place its judgments beyond the reach of fashionable 
coteries or temporary prejudices. It is not so much the nature 
of the tribunal we would object to, — if the free and unbiassed 
exercise of its judgment could be obtained, — as its liability to 
being warped by foreign influence. In some matters, as in 
the higher walks of satire, its opinions do not seem of much 



4 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

weight. There are far more copies, now, in circulation of the 
" Minstrel," than of " Roscius." Yet, who would take Beattie for 
a greater poet than Churchill, — the one hardly deserving of the 
name, and the other the author of the most nervous lines in 
our language. But Churchill shot his arrows at particular 
characters of his age, now well-nigh forgotten ; and the private 
recklessness of the man, together with the ephemeral subjects 
of his muse, has eclipsed his poetical genius in the eyes of a 
generation which regards moral dignity as one of the first con- 
stituents of divine poetry. Even upon subjects with which it 
is competent to deal, the opinion of the commonalty is 
frequently not an independent opinion, but one adopted on 
trust at the dictation of literary cliques, or of persons of refined, 
but conventional, sympathies. For the public, occasionally, 
with respect to this branch of art, is in an idle mood, and 
luxuriously reposes upon the judgments manufactured for it 
by others. Sometimes, the unformed and growing state of a 
language, at others a perverted taste, will warp its judgment, 
and invest, as with a haze, the exercise of its critical faculties. 
At the rise of Greek letters, smooth writing was more esteemed 
than sublimity, and Simonides carried off the prize from 
^Eschylus ; just as, at the origin of Latin comedy, Ennius was 
much more in repute than Terence or Plautus. But a more 
refined age reversed these crude decisions. The age of the 
Restoration was so blinded by political fanaticism and by French 
levity, as to prefer Sedley to Milton, and the plays of Shadwell 
to those of Shakespeare. It is, thus, that our ancient temples 
have occasionally to submit to the indignities of having the 
most salient beauties of their architecture buried beneath coats 
of lime-plaster. A generation rises up who sees more ornament 
in a flat surface of white chalk than in a groined arch, or in a 
bullioned window, or rich architrave, and who proceed to 
realize their barbarities, by consigning these triumphs to tem- 
porary oblivion. If, therefore, we are to rely upon universal 
suffrage as a guide to a correct discernment of the poetical 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE IN ART. 5 

faculty, in matters falling within its competency, then, to make 
the test of real value, it must be one based upon the concurrent 
testimony of two or more ages, in order to eliminate the causes 
which occasionally interfere with its exercise upon independent 
and unfactitious grounds. For the past is crowded with bubble 
reputations, which once filled Europe with their fame. Who 
would think of citing Davenant and Blackmore, now, as poets, 
except in the lowest meaning of the term ? Yet in the eyes of 
their contemporaries, their place was as high as any on the 
steeps of Parnassus. What poet in his day filled a larger 
portion of the public eye than Ronsard, or a less portion than 
Milton ? Yet their generations had no sooner past away, than 
the renowned was consigned to oblivion, and the obscure was 
lifted up to greatness. It would, therefore, be a high degree 
of rashness, to conclude from the present, the future reputation 
of a poet. His contemporary fame is an earnest of endurinp 
greatness, only so far as his works may be conformable to the 
canons of sound criticism. If they will not stand this test, 
his triumph, depending on the breath of a fleeting multitude, 
must collapse, when that multitude shall have passed away. 



ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



CHAPTER II. 
PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. 

WHAT are the elements of poetry? Are there any 
marks or tests by which the higher, may be dis- 
tinguished from its lower forms, endorsed by the judgment of 
the past, and likely to meet with so general an acceptance, as to 
anticipate with reference to contemporary poets, the judgment 
of the future ? Aristotle tried his hand at elaborating canons of 
poetical criticism, over twenty-two hundred years ago; but, owing 
to his fondness for abstract theories, and the narrow area to 
which his views were necessarily confined, his judgments would 
not be of much help to us now. How far poetry is an imitative 
art; what are the different species into which it may be 
divided ; what construction of plot is most calculated to 
produce excellence ; what are the functions of the Greek 
chorus, or the nature of the unities of time and place, — 
these are all that the master of Greek criticism touches in a 
theoretical manner, without the slightest psychological analysis, 
or any objective basis, beyond the literature of his own 
country. We stand, however, in this respect, in a superior 
position to Aristotle, having a better method, and a far more 
enlarged field to furnish a basis for our enquiries, as well 
as to test the accuracy of any theories which we may form 
upon the subject. These advantages enable us to go farther 
than Aristotle, who merely summarized the principles upon 
which the great poets of Greece acted, as a guide to a 



PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. 



correct judgment of the past; whereas, we would summarize 
the more enlarged principles which our national poets have 
exemplified, as a guide to the judgment of the future. From 
the standard by which the poetry of the past has been estimated, 
we would fashion our opinions as to that of the present, in 
order to foreshadow as in a mirror the judgment of posterity. 

Here, however, we encounter on the threshold of the subject 
a difficulty ; that is the variable nature of the organization of 
each individual to whom we appeal. We can readily agree 
in making out what constitutes the elements of poetry. But, 
discord is too apt to arise, when we assign to this writer such 
a depth of pathos, and to another such an amount of imagination, 
or sublimity, simply because we have no accurate weights or 
measures universally recognised, by which the intensity of such 
spiritual qualities can be tested, as readily as the quantities of 
material things. Brown, for instance, has a highly sympathetic 
nature, which only awaits a spark to explode. Jones's nature, 
on the contrary, is hard as iron, and could not be melted 
without being cast into a furnace. The poet, who appears to 
Brown profoundly pathetic, will strike Jones as being entirely 
wanting in that element. It is this variable organization which 
colours most of the criticism of the day, and makes art judg- 
ments so divergent and so conflicting. One critic is lymphatic ; 
he, therefore, deals very severely with a writer of a highly 
imaginative character. Another has a very sanguine tempera- 
ment ; he, consequently, has no patience with a poet of the 
philosophic class. It is the same with nations as with individuals. 
The French have a very imperfect conception of the sublime ; 
and, therefore, Milton and Shakespeare have never been ap- 
preciated by them, to anything like the full extent of their 
genius. The Germans have a very inadequate notion of the 
facetious; and, therefore, the reputations of Hood, Swift, and 
Butler to them are so many enigmas. The Italians, likewise, 
lack the spirit of profound introspective analysis, and, there- 
fore, such writers as Wordsworth and Coleridge are still at a 



8 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

discount on the other side of the Alps. It does not, however, 
follow, on account of these varying standards, that we are un- 
able to test or gauge the qualities entering into the composition 
of any individual writer, at least within some definite limits of 
accuracy, any more than we should be unable to measure the 
dimensions or distances of the stars, on account of the variable 
haziness of the atmosphere through which they are viewed. We, 
in England, springing from a mixture of foreign peoples, are, 
perhaps, more fitted to wield the critical sceptre than any of 
our neighbours, who are much less composite in their origin. But, 
as the results of criticism, under the most favourable conditions, 
cannot be measured by any yard line, or counted upon our ten 
fingers, they must fail to coerce the irrational, the phlegmatic, 
and the dull ; and, therefore, at best can only be expected to 
meet with general, and not universal, recognition. 

The question, as to what constitutes poetry, has been 
answered in various ways according to the notion uppermost 
in the writer's mind, rather than with a view to embrace the 
subject within the limits of a logical definition. Shelley has 
described poetry, as the language of the imagination, which is 
only one, though the chief element in it. Byron calls poetry, 
the feeling of past worlds and future, which is a description of 
the subject matter about which poetry is mainly, but by no 
means exhaustively, employed. Aristotle evidently thought 
he had fathomed the subject, when he told his readers, poetry 
was an imitative art, and that the things imitated were the pas- 
sions and the manners of men. But this only reveals one of 
the modes by which the art manifests itself. Keats has more 
graphically represented poetry under the figure of a vessel, with 
invention for its pole star, imagination for the sails, and wit for 
its rudder. But imagination and invention in poetry are fre- 
quently only two ways of looking at the same thing. The 
metaphor, therefore, will not bear analysis. Coleridge, perhaps, 
has more accurately expressed himself, when he describes good 
sense as the body of poetry, fancy its drapery, motion its life, 



PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. 



and imagination its soul. We need, however, a complete and 
exhaustive definition of the elements of poetry, and not a loose 
enumeration of the faculties employed in their manipulation. 
Such Leigh Hunt has attempted, in defining poetry as the 
utterance of a passion for truth, beauty, and power, embodying 
and illustrating its conception's by imagination and fancy, and 
modulating its language on the principle of variety in uni- 
formity. But this definition would exclude pure thought, and 
that wide circle of subjects in which feeling is made tributary 
to it, without manifesting that overmastering energy which 
imaginative passion would imply. A large portion of, what 
may be called, pure, descriptive, contemplative, and didactic 
poetry, would, if Leigh Hunt's definition were accepted, have 
to be separated from its domain. It is evident that these and 
other such attempts to enclose within fixed boundaries, all the 
peculiar region of poetry, only present us with fragments of the 
subject, which are often, indeed, insisted upon with the sec- 
tarian spirit of excluding those, from the roll of poets, against 
whom the framers of such definitions have any antipathy. 

This thrusting the idle figments of the fancy too promi- 
nently forward, as the grand discriminating criterion of poetry, 
has been a source of great mischief, in deterring a matter-of-fact 
age from cultivating a deep acquaintance with a subject so 
powerfully capable of neutralizing its prosaic tendencies. 
Society is too much considered, in the present age, under its 
economic aspects. Men are considered as almost exclusively 
influenced by motives of gain. All aesthetic feeling, as a motive 
power, is banished from the world of action, and pinioned to 
the sphere of sentiment. Hence poetry, as the expression or 
embodiment of our perception of beauty, is considered as the 
mere pastime of our leisure hours, leaving no further mark on 
the world's course, than the last game of billiards, or the next 
game of croquet. Whereas, what is the fact? The ancient 
nations fought with desperate energy, for ten years, on account 
of a beautiful woman, and even in these economic times, two of 



io ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

the most advanced races in Europe, have disorganized their 
social structure, and rushed to exterminate each other, on 
account of a beautiful river. The Celt and the Teuton, indeed, 
have been fighting, at intermittent intervals, for the Rhine, 
during the last 300 years. The crusades, which flung Europe at 
the throat of Asia, and which have given more colour to modern 
history than any other event, arose out of feelings connected with 
man's yearnings for the infinite, and those spiritual aspirations 
which constitute the essence of poetry. The influence of 
popular songs upon the multitude is known to all. The "Lilli- 
bullero" was one of the chief agents in effecting the collapse 
of the Stuart dynasty, and the Marseillaise, more powerfully 
than any other cause, contributed to the victories which the 
armies of the French Republic gained over those of foreign 
despots. The hymns of the early Christian Church, or those 
sung by the Albigenses in their mountain fastnesses, acted like 
a talisman in perpetuating modes of belief destined to fling 
society upon fresh paths. 

It appears, therefore, so far from the subject of poetry being 
the mere ebullition of man's transient feelings, or its expression 
falling like a snow-flake upon the stream of events, no subjects 
lie so permanently about man's heart, or are more intimately 
connected with his most serious affairs, or have so definitely 
moulded the course of history, as those which ordinarily find 
their useful embodiment in song. But the most favourable idea 
now entertained of poetry is, that it is a sort of phantom world, 
a mere region of spectral illusion with which truth has very little 
to do, beyond engrafting living passion on mimic heroes, and 
making fictitious characters assume the appearance of reality. 
This, certainly, embraces a large slice of the poetic territory, but 
by no means the heart of it. For, the description of actual, falls 
as much within the function of the poet, as imaginary, suffering. 
We are liable indeed to be more excited by the narration of real, 
than simulated, passion. Burns' " Highland Mary" comes much 
nearer to our feelings than the " Angelica " of Ariosto, and we 



PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. n 

are moved more by the every-day realities in Crabbe, than by 
any of the enchantments in Spenser. It is the province of poetry, 
to carry us out of ourselves, to make us forget our own petty 
concerns and selfish views in the sympathy created by the joys 
and griefs of others ; to make our hearts beat in unison with 
the general interests of humanity ; and whether the means, by 
which these results are achieved, have a real or fictitious basis, 
it amounts pretty much to the same thing as far as the scope 
of the art is concerned. 

Hence, it appears, that powers of observation and keen 
analysis of life and character play a distinguished part in 
poetic composition, and that they may occasionally supply the 
place of imagination, where they are not, as in fictitious nar- 
rative, subsidiary to it. Chaucer is generally a favourite poet, 
with those who accept the purely imaginative element, as the 
distinguishing feature in poetry. But even in the tales of Chaucer, 
there are pictures drawn from contemporary life and manners, 
with which the imaginative element had nothing whatever to 
do. These pictures entirely arose out of the emotions which 
certain visual facts excited in his mind. In the above category 
may be set down the poems of Crabbe, the satires of Dryden 
and Juvenal, the moral essays and epistles of Pope and Horace. 
Here, we have external character graphically delineated, social 
phenomena faithfully reproduced, and both relieved by lively 
sallies of wit or the softer emotions of pity. Even in the great 
creative poets, where the imaginative element rules supreme, 
the inferential and constructive faculties, with philosophic 
insight into human events, play a most distinguished role, in the 
evolution of poetic thought ; for not only have fabulous per- 
sonages to be vitalized by human passion, but fictitious nar- 
ratives have to be constructed, with that logical sequence which 
always sees the effect in the cause, and reads in a knot of 
composite phenomena, a few abiding laws and plastic ideas. 
Unity has to be impressed upon a mass of heterogeneous 
materials. Divergent parts have to be centralized, and artistic 



12 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

design made to wear all the appearance of nature. It is evi- 
dent, therefore, though a philosopher need not be a poet, that 
a great poet must be a philosopher. 

As Leigh Hunt denned poetry to be passionate imagination, 
Ebenezer Elliot, himself a poet of no inconsiderable powers, cha- 
racterized it as impassioned truth. To this view, John Stuart 
Mill has more or less subscribed, by denominating poetry, as, 
the mere influence of the feelings over our thoughts in soli- 
tude, and the embodiment of theN ideas resulting therefrom, in 
metrical language. But I would guard as much against making 
all poetry the mere temporary ebullition of the feelings, as the 
simple product of the imaginative element Ebenezer Elliot's 
definition, though good as far as it goes, is, like all those which 
have preceded it, only fragmentary. For, all truth which awakes 
within us the feeling of the infinite, whether impassioned or 
not, I hold to be poetry. Hence, all recondite laws which 
reveal the foundation of our being, or excite a vivid sensation 
of the past, or a palpable foreshadowing of the future, consti- 
tute poetry, in the loftiest sense. What the doctrine of destiny 
was to the Greek, the abiding permanence of law, as revealed 
in all social and natural phenomena, is to us. In this light, 
poetry may be considered as philosophy made sensible. In 
following Hamlet into the churchyard, we derive an important 
lesson as to the indestructibility of matter. " Why may not 
imagination follow the noble dust of Alexander till we find it 
stopping up a bung-hole?" When Spenser calls the lily the 
plant and flower of light, he points to the fact, that there is no 
substance in the lily to decompose light, and, therefore, it is 
clad in pure whiteness. In like manner, when Byron tells us, that 
the mind in love is fevered into false creation, and that neither 
worth nor beauty exist outside the mind's ideal shape of such,* 
the poet reveals a psychological truth which might form the 
basis of a metaphysical theory. When he, also, identifies man's 
first consummation of love with his fall,! he supplies a her- 
* " Childe Harold," c. iv., s. 122, 123. + "Don Juan," c. i., v. 127. 



PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. 13 

meneutical key to the First Book of Genesis, which the Jews 
themselves have long admitted the sense of. So when Ten- 
nyson, in allusion to the religious aspect of humanity, says, 

Our petty systems have their day, 

They have their day and cease to be, 

They are but broken lights of Thee, 
And Thou, O ! Lord, art more than they:* — 

to what else can the poet refer but the fact, real or assumed, that 
the character of men's creeds depends upon their state of know- 
ledge, and that, as their scientific basis shifts, the mode in which 
they worship the Deity, must vary, according to the insight into 
His nature which they gain from His works? Again, when Byron 
speaks of our nature being bound with an electric chain, which, as 
it is stricken by any casual object, presses past recollections upon 
us,f he lays bare a fundamental law in connection with the 
association of ideas. In most of these cases, the exercise of 
the imagination is common both to the poet and philosopher. 
But, the man of science subjects the suggestions of that faculty 
to rigid numerical tests or to the ordeal of experiment, 
while the poet leaves them in their shadowy state to throw a 
veil of spirituality over the material world. The one employs 
the imagination to connect facts with abiding laws, to reveal, 
by means of general axioms, the mechanism of the universe. 
The other uses the imagination to reveal the sources of the 
mechanism itself, and its connection with the infinite. The 
one seeks to explain certain classes of phenomena by de- 
finite principles, the other mounts to the causes in which both 
principles and phenomena have their origin. Hence, it not 
unfrequently happens that poets, while contemplating the 
marvels of the universe, hit upon truths which anticipate 
scientific discoveries, and sometimes, indeed, serve as the basis 
of scientific progress. The law of gravitation has been found 
in Dante. Shakespeare revealed the circulation of the blood, 

* "In Memoriam." Prelude, 
t " Childe Harold," c. iv., s. 23. 



14 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

before it was propounded by Harvey.* Goethe, while con- 
templating plants, hit upon the important law regulating their 
growth, which has revolutionized botany. It came into the 
mind of the same poet, stumbling over some bones in a 
churchyard, that the spinal sheath was only a prolongation 
of the development of the skull, an idea of which Owen 
has made so much in his work on the vertebrae of animals. 
We all know that the poet Haiiy, while pondering over the 
beauty of the inorganic world, discovered the great law of 
the isomorphism of minerals, solving that problem by an 
effort of the imagination, which had baffled the efforts of a 
crowd of inductive philosophers. It is, indeed, a function 
which the poet enjoys in common with the philosopher, 
to conduct the soul into the interior adyta of the universe, 
to reveal hidden laws, and to bring to light the host of ana- 
logies which exist between the spiritual and material order of 
things. So far, then, is poetry from being opposed to science 
and philosophy, that it may be regarded as the helpmate to 
both. It deals primarily with truth, and only with fiction as 
subsidiary thereto. When the poet wishes to show the play of 
peculiar passions, under peculiar circumstances, he has recourse 
to fabulous narrative. But truth is, nevertheless, his object, 
though it may be derivative. Where the circumstances are 
not feigned, but real, the truth he aims at is direct. But 
whether derivative or direct, the poet fulfils his loftiest mission, 
when the truths which he sets forth assume the dignity of abiding 
laws, revealing the foundations of man's nature, or laying bare 
those great principles which blend the mind with the harmonies 
of the external world, and control his destinies under conflict- 
ing civilizations. If these truths are oftener intertwined with 
fable than otherwise, it is to make them more -universal or 
general, to interest the human heart in their evolution, and 
enable the poet to display them with more unshackled 
facility. 

* "Coriolanus," Act i., sc. t, — Speech of Menenius Agrippa. 



PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. 15 

Truth, then, I would make equally the aim of the poet and 
the philosopher. But with the man of science, it is truth 
unconnected with the feelings, truth reduced into system, rising 
from the ground of numerical tests and of inductive experi- 
ment; whereas, the poet deals with truth in its deductive 
range, arising out of his imaginative instincts and connected 
with his emotional nature. But, while admitting poetic truth 
to be always suffused with feeling, I would not go as far as 
Mr. Mill in saying that feeling ought to be the leading element 
in it.* Just as I would guard the domain of poetry from 
being unduly monopolized by fiction, so I would guard it from 
being the arena of vague sentimentality. The loftiest poetry 
must be tinged with feeling, but never entirely dominated by 
it. Thought, not mere emotion, must be the guiding principle 
in it. But Mr. Mill inverts this position. He will have it, that 
the highest poetry is the mere ebullition of feeling, and that 
where thought comes in to assume the guiding rein, we realize 
the distinction between poets of culture, as distinguished from 
those of nature. He, even, cites Wordsworth, confessedly one 
of the first poets of this country, as one who allowed thought 
to guide his feelings, and, therefore, as one who could not 
derive his poetic lineage from nature. But on this subject, the 
popular judgment appears sounder than that of the philosopher. 
For, those are generally esteemed poets of culture who produce 
nothing strikingly original themselves, but allow the thoughts 
and phraseology of other writers to dominate their ideas and 
expressions ; while genuine poets, or, in other words, those 
not made but born such, derive their heritage from nature, quite 
independent of the influence of others. They are those who 
enrich the world with new thoughts, and who only employ feeling 
to stamp their ideas with that earnestness which blend them 
with the human heart for ever. The rational and emotional 
nature have each their proper functions, the one as the guiding, 
and the other, as the motive, power ; but if the propelling is to 
* " Poetry and its Varieties : Essays and Dissertations." 



16 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

usurp the place of the ruling, force, a feminine element is 
introduced, destructive alike of that lofty conception, of that 
symmetry of design, of that grandeur of purpose, which we 
seek in first-class poetry. The elements of poetry are so 
many, that to embrace them in one concise definition, in such 
order as to give to each its relative value and significance, 
is a difficult task, and one in which I shall, doubtless, be con- 
sidered to fare little better than my predecessors. But though 
the definition can only be deemed of a tentative nature, I must 
not here evade the opportunity of attempting it. In accord- 
ance, therefore, with the views already expressed, poetry may 
be said to be an art both imitative and inventive, of which 
truth is the object, whereby is expressed in metrical language, 
man's conception of the relation between the actual and the 
ideal, the concrete and the infinite. Here, we have the form 
of poetry, the two invariable modes by which it manifests 
itself, and the subject-matter about which it is employed. 
Imagination and fancy enter more largely into it than any 
other powers, without, however, excluding reason, both intui- 
tive and discursive, which, in combination with feeling, 
occasionally gives birth to lofty poetry, and which invariably 
forms the chart by which the poet unifies his complex 
design, and steers his imagination into the haven of truth and 
reality. 

The powers of the mind are all employed in poetry, but in 
different degrees, and its subject-matter is the present universe 
and all possible worlds beyond. This illimitable region is con- 
tained in the relations between the ideal and the actual. For, 
in the ideal, we can never lose sight of the actual, but must 
shape our conceptions in conformity with its types, as the only 
means of impressing them as active agents upon others ; just as 
in the actual, we must never lose sight of the ideal ; otherwise, 
we get upon mere matters of fact devoid of genuine truth, and, 
therefore, containing no poetry whatever. The actual and the 
ideal refer to pictures of life or historic truth ; the concrete and 



PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. 17 

the infinite, to philosophic truth, or those revealing the main- 
springs of our being, the nature of the soul, and its connection 
with the universe. With the actual and the concrete in them- 
selves, emotion may only be occasionally blended, but their rela- 
tion to the infinite and ideal is the source of that world of feeling 
which lofty intellectual effort evokes, and which is connected 
with our joys and our hopes, our aspirations and our sorrows. 

Poetry is commonly divided into five primary species, viz., 
the epic, dramatic, lyric, didactic, and satiric. In these are 
included seven derivative forms. The didactic may be viewed 
as containing the descriptive, the satiric, the poetry of wit and 
humour. The lyric embraces the elegy, the ode, and the 
ballad. The epos branches out into the two kinds of narrative 
poetry, the one complex, or representative, which is a sort of 
bastard epic, the other simple, as the common or bucolic idyl. 
The epos and 1 the drama are at the top of the scale, and de- 
scriptive poetry, and that of mere wit and humour, at the bottom. 
These two ends are connected in due gradation by the repre- 
sentative poem, which ranks next after the drama, followed by 
the two higher forms of the lyric ; then come the didactic and 
satiric, which are succeeded by the simple narrative poem, the 
ballad, and the bucolic idyl. I do not know that this order of 
rank differs materially from any other previously given, unless we 
adopt Mr. Mill's theory, which makes the lyric and the elegiac 
the highest species of poetry, as these are supposed to embody 
more feeling than any other, and places the epic and dramatic 
at the top of the tree, because they include the lyric and 
the elegiac as well as all the rest. But as the three greatest 
epic poems extant comprise no instance of either lyric or 
elegiac poetry, this view is clearly unmaintainable. We are, 
therefore, obliged to adopt the order already assigned, by the 
desirability of preserving a due gradation between the different 
species of poetry, not according to the test of so unstable a 
thing as feeling, but according to the degrees of mental strength 
which each requires for its successful cultivation. 



1 8 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

There is this much in the Greek conception of poetry, viz., 
as something made after the fashion of nature, that it reveals 
to us the two pivots upon which all genuine poetry turns. 
Without invention or imitation, no real poetry can be said to 
exist ; but invention may be exercised beyond the confines of the 
actual, as well as within it. Invention purely ideal is invention 
of the loftiest kind. But within the domain of the actual, it 
may be taken in the higher sense of the invention of great plots 
or characters, or in the lower, of the devising incidents by which 
sudden turns or agreeable surprises are prepared to keep alive 
the attention of the reader. The two higher kinds constitute 
the soul of epic and dramatic, the last of ballad, elegiac, and 
lyric poetry. The epos and the drama, however, embrace the 
lower forms of invention, but the ballad, the elegy, and the ode 
never comprise the higher. The superiority, therefore, of the 
epos and drama to the other species of poetry may be said to rest 
on the greater powers of mind involved in their delineation. 

Imitation is another element of distinction between the same 
and different species of poetry, a proper consideration of 
which will help us to fix the rank of each on a psychological 
basis. Imitation, like invention, has its higher and lower forms ; 
but only in the latter of these is it taken in its direct and 
obvious sense. Shakespeare, when he describes a storm, skil- 
fully paints the effects of certain natural phenomena ; but when 
he introduces us to aerials and to witches, we get types of 
character beyond the region of nature, which have, however, 
to be developed according to a certain standard of truthfulness 
which nature has stamped on our imagination. This is creative 
imitation. When the characters do not conform to the natural 
type, the imitation is defective. When they answer all its 
requirements, the poet succeeds in accomplishing the highest 
feat of his art — that is, in imitating, while he sublimes, nature 
into higher forms than are to be met with in actual life. For 
this is in some respects like enlarging the bounds and multi- 
plying the objects^of creation, — a work in which the poet more 



PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. i$ 

closely than any other being approaches the attributes of the 
divinity, the sphere of creation being God's peculiar province. 

In this the loftiest region of poetry, imitation, however, has 
its least palpable function, and may be said to consist as much 
in the poet's characters not doing anything to shock nature, 
as acting in conformity with its dictates. In this sense, imi- 
tation is but the humble handmaid of invention, toiling after 
her creations, only to be occasionally called in to impart 
life and animation to the picture. The next step in the 
descent to a lower ground of imitation is the description of the 
manners and passions of men; but this imitation is either 
particular or generic, according as the poet copies actual cha- 
racters, or follows the ideal types of such existing in his own 
breast. The former is imitation in its natural or objective 
sense ; the latter is imitation in a minor or derivative sense, 
and is identical with the representative faculty. In the higher 
species of poetry, this derivative imitation has wider scope 
than in the lower, and being more general and complex in its 
character, has much less tendency to degenerate, into objective 
imitation ; while in poetry of a merely descriptive class, as in 
the common idyl, the poet is too apt to copy real models, and 
in proportion as he does so, is entitled to less merit, as his 
delineations to that extent are wanting in ideal truth. In 
some degree, imitation in either sense pervades all forms of 
poetry, but in the drama and the complex narrative poem, 
objective imitation is almost exclusively shut out by the uni- 
versal and generic character of the subjects, and in the didactic 
poem and the satire, its range is materially contracted by the 
discursive faculty, which is only another phase of the inventive 
element, as by reason and comparison the poet is enabled to 
put striking thoughts in opposition, and dazzle the mind by 
flashes of wit, by recondite analogies, and startling antitheses : 
whereas in the common idyl and descriptive poem, the par- 
ticular nature of the subject leads the mind to fasten on 
objective models, and allures it away from the search of ideal 



20 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

types in itself. "This is particularly the case in descriptive 
poetry, which chiefly consists of a skilful reproduction of rural 
objects, such as we meet with in the "Seasons" of Thomson and 
the " Georgics " of Virgil. But even here, there is large play for 
invention in its lower forms, by the selection of such masses 
of colour and groups of objects as are calculated to produce 
the most startling effects. This artistic combination of natural 
scenery is sometimes only a framework for the loves of rustic 
people, the reproduction of which must vary in merit, according 
to the degree in which it embraces the derivative or objective 
element of imitation. But the range of pastoral poetry is as 
confined as the minds of the clowns it would represent, and is 
too apt, when reproduced in our day, to be a copy of the pictures 
of others, or, in other words, to manifest nothing but reflex 
imitation, or imitation of the lowest kind . 

It is this form of imitation which distinguishes poets of 
culture from poets of nature. For, the modification of other 
people's thoughts, the domination of their own ideas by 
hackneyed images or trite phraseology, is consistent with an 
exquisite sense of harmony, and with a certain degree of refine- 
ment which, in the eyes of the vulgar, are capable of clothing 
their possessors with the mantle of divine poetry. But not- 
withstanding the meretricious gilding with which it may be 
adorned, this reflex imitation will be found to be nothing 
less than a reproduction of the experiences and thoughts and 
stereotyped phrases of others ; and according as it prevails in 
poetry, the art degenerates, until we arrive, in purely imitative 
poets, at the weakest echo of divine harmony, or the most 
washed-out copy of the ethereal image. The two branches of 
real imitation, objective and reflex, are allied in copying some- 
thing external to the mind, just as the two ideal branches of 
imitation, derivative and creative, are allied in adhering to 
types which are furnished from within; while in the higher 
walks of the art, in which the poet lays bare the mysteries of 
the soul, the mainsprings of man's nature, or the more recondite 



PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. 



laws of the universe, imitation plays the least important part, if 
it be not submerged in invention altogether. So far, then, from 
imitation ruling supreme in every branch of poetry, it would 
appear that the quality of poetry ranges from the lower to the 
higher grade, according as imitation, in its plain and obvious 
sense, is departed from, or its sphere is narrowed by the 
predominance of invention and the representative faculty. 
In fact, objective imitation and invention are two spheres in 
poetry, corresponding to the actual and ideal, which increase 
and diminish in inverse proportion to each other. In descriptive 
poetry, we get the maximum of imitation with the minimum 
of invention. In the epos and the drama, this condition of 
things is precisely reversed. Equilibrium, however, is never 
established. In the simple narrative poem, the balance is in 
favour of the objective ; in the didactic and satiric poem, of 
the inventive or subjective element. But this may be taken 
as a truth, that according as the actual is incorporated with the 
ideal, or mere reflex images blended with those of a derivative 
character, not only the rank of different species of poetry may 
be fixed, but the merit of poems of the same species may be 
determined. A descriptive poem in which there is small, will 
be inferior to a descriptive poem in which there is great, ideality. 
A narrative poem in which the imitation is derivative, will be 
superior to one in which the imitation is reflex or objective. 

In our conceptions of the actual, we are dependent upon 
thought and feeling ; but we cannot ascend far into the regions 
of the ideal, without the assistance of fancy and imagination. 
It is the relation of these two terms to each other, which throws 
the main light upon the frontier line between the ranks of differ- 
ent species of poetry. In their origin, Imagination and Fancy 
were identical, being only two ways, which different nations 
had, of designating the same subject. What with the Greeks 
was an appearance, with the Latins was an image. But the 
tendency of later times has been to desynonomize the two 
terms, or to erect a barrier of distinction between them. 



22 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Imagination, however, we must first recognize, in its secondary 
poetical sense, as the representative faculty, or the power of 
reproducing past scenes or events, as they appear to have 
actually occurred, with which Fancy has little or nothing in 
common. It is only Imagination in its primary poetical sense 
which Fancy allies itself with, and frequently seeks to rival ; 
that is, the power which creates, evokes, or aggregates and 
combines, which unifies the many into one, or disperses unity 
into many. For both Imagination and Fancy seek different 
ends by the same means. Some writers would make Imagina- 
tion consist in the plastic power of forming distinct images, 
of detecting hidden links of association ; and Fancy in linking 
these embodiments together. But this is a mere arbitrary 
distinction, having no foundation in the reason of things. 
The popular idea appears to be, that Fancy is only an exertion 
upon a smaller scale, of the same faculty of which Imagination 
is the higher element. Within certain limits, this may be ac- 
cepted as true ; for both processes are to some extent identical, 
though employed upon different objects, or upon bringing the 
same objects under different laws. Fancy rather deals with fixed 
and definite quantities, which refuse to be moulded by any plastic 
energy; Imagination, with the measureless or the indefinite, 
which can be contracted or expanded to suit the purpose of 
the poet. Thus the extent of the ocean, which refuses to be 
grasped by the sense, Milton adroitly minifies, in order to 
aggrandize the bulk of the 

Leviathan, which God of all His works 
Created hugest that swim the ocean stream.* 

And again — 

There, Leviathan, 
Hugest of living creatures, on the deep 
Stretched like a promontory, sleeps or swims, 
And seems a moving land, and at his gills 
Draws in, and at his trunk spouts out, a sea. t 

* " Parad. L.," b. i., 1. 200. t " Parad. L.," b. vii., 1. 410. 



PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. 23 

When Dante compares the giants who fought with Jove, rising 
out of the pit of hell, to the towers of Montereggione looming 
through the darkness, the impression is one of vagueness and 
immensity.* But when Shakespeare compares the shape of 
Queen Mab to an agate-stone on the forefinger of an alderman, 
we get the exercise of the same faculty upon a scale of 
circumscribed minuteness. Milton's personifications of Sin 
and Death are embodiments of the Imagination ; Shakespeare's 
Titania, and her fairies, creations of the Fancy. It would, how- 
ever, be absurd to deny that both are efforts of the same power 
to give to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. To 
realize the idea of vastness, Milton, by a lofty effort of imagina- 
tion, compares Satan, drawn up to his full height, to Atlas or 
Teneriffe, with stature reaching to the sky. But Spenser, when 
he would describe the crest of Prince Arthur, compares him 
to an almond-tree : 

On top of green Selinis all alone, 
With blossoms brave bedecked daintily, 
Whose tender locks do tremble every one 
At every little breath that under heaven is blown ;t 

which is in conception and execution an effort of the Fancy. 
Milton, in " Samson Agonistes," likens an over-dressed woman, 
moving with all her toggery spread, to a ship in full sail. 
This is Fancy. But in describing Satan exploring his way 
through the air, no less an image will suit him, as a standard of 
comparison, than a fleet descried afar off at sea, which seems 
to hang in the clouds. This is Imagination. The description of 
morning in Beaumont and Fletcher, 

See, the day begins to break, 

And the light shoots like a streak of subtile fire ; 

and in the elder Marston's " Antonio and Melida," 

Is not yon gleam the shuddering morn that flakes 
With silver tincture the east verge of heaven ? 

are both instances of exquisite Fancy. 

* " Inferno," canto 31, v. 34. + " Faery Queen," b. i., c. 7, st. 32. 



24 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



But Shakespeare's description of the same object : 

The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night, 
Checkering the eastern clouds with streaks of light, 
And flecked darkness like a drunkard's reels ;* 



and Byron's : 



The morn is up again, the blushing morn, 

With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom, 

Laughing away the clouds with playful scorn j t 



and Kirke White's : 

Morn, like a traveller girt for travel, comes, 
And from his tower of mist, 
Night's watchman hurries down ; 

and Spenser's : 

The joyous day 'gan early to appear, 

And fair Aurora from her dewy bed 

Of aged Tithon 'gan herself to rear 

With rosy cheeks, for shame, as blushing red, + 

are each instances of the Imagination. 

When Shakespeare compares the minutes of our lives hastening 
to their end, with the waves of the sea rushing to the pebbled 
shore, this is Fancy ; but when he describes the same waves 
in a tempest : 

Upon the foaming shore 
The chidden billows seem to pelt the clouds, 
The wind-shaked surge, with high and monstrous mane, 
Seeming to cast water on the burning bear, 
And quench the guards of the ever-fixed pole, 

Imagination is at work, seeking to transfer the hubbub of the 
elements to our own minds. 

There is also a vitalizing power in imagination — a tendency to 
clothe inanimate objects with the feelings and affections which 

* " Romeo and Juliet," Act ii., sc. 3. f "Childe Harold," c. Hi. 

\ "F. Queen," b. i., c. ii., st. 51. 



PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. 25 

dominate our own breasts, as when Cassio would answer for 
the safety of the Moor's bride : 

Tempests themselves, high seas, and howling winds, 
The gutter'd rocks, and congregated sands, 
Traitors ensteep'd to clog the guiltless keel, — 
As having sense of beauty, — do omit 
Their mortal natures, letting go swiftly by 
The divine Desdemona. 

Occasionally this overmastering effort of passion to bring every 
neighbouring object within the pale of its influence, would 
seem to point to kindred associations in nature, as in Burns' 
Highland Mary : 

The flowers sprang wanton to be prest, 
The birds sang love on every spray ; 

or in the lines of Berni, which make the grass burst into flower 
around the sleeping Angelica, and the river at her feet babble 
of love : 

Parea che l'erba le fiorisse intorno 
E d'amor razionasse quella riva. * 

But when the affinities or sympathetic links between inanimate 
objects have no basis in nature, when they are mere figments 
of the brain, with little or no connection with feeling or passion, 
they come under the denomination of Fancy, as in the exquisite 
lines of Herbert : 

Thou lovely day, so calm and bright, 
Sweet bridal of the earth and sky, 
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night, 
For thou must die. 

When Cowper compares Winter to a grisly old man whose 
beard is " with steel-like ashes filled," we have an exertion of 
fancy ; but when Coleridge, by a bold metaphor, describes 
Winter, in February, wearing upon its slumbering face a smile 

* " Orlando Innam.," c. iii., st. 78. 



26 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



of Spring, he vitalizes nature, and gives us an offshoot of the 
imagination. 

In like manner, when Lochiel informs us how he is a seer — 

'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore, 
And coming events cast their shadows before, 

we have a lofty instance of imagination transferring the pro- 
perty of the sunset to lengthen the shadows of objects, to 
Lochiel in the evening of his life, who is thus enabled to reveal 
coming events, before they have invaded man's horizon. But 
when Aaron, in " Titus Andronicus," bent upon revenge, says, 

My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls, 
Even as an adder when she does unrol 
To do some fatal execution, 

we have an instance of Fancy, or, in other words, an analogy 
of appearance not founded in nature. The contrary, how- 
ever, happens when Wordsworth assures us that 'tis his faith 
that there is not a flower but what enjoys the air it breathes. 
Here he vitalizes a sympathetic link already existing between 
the two objects of his thought. But when stretched on his couch, 
in pensive mood, he recalls a bed of daffodils he had seen 
fluttering in the breeze, and feels his heart dance with them 
in one round of pleasure, we have an analogy existing merely 
in the poet's brain, unvitalized by passion, — that Promethean 
fire which only can endue lifeless objects with sensuous activity. 
In like manner, when Keats addresses the moon, 

The booming world of waters bows to thee, 
And Tellus feels his forehead's cumbrous load, 

we have a ripe instance of Imagination ; but when Ben Jonson 
bids the moon 

Now the sun is laid asleep, 
Seated on thy silver chair, 

State in wonted manner keep,* 

* " Cynthia's Revels," Act v., sc. iii. 



PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. 27 

he affords us a good exemplification of Fancy. The nearer 
the image is to truth, in embodying some law or operation of 
nature, though less perfect in form, it manifests the imaginative 
element ; the farther from truth, though more complete in form, 
the element of the fancy ; thus when Thomson invites Spring 
to descend, as if she were a nymph, in a shower of roses upon 
our plains, he manifests Fancy ; but when Byron, in that touch- 
ing allusion to Howard on the field of Waterloo, sees around 
him 

The wild field revive 
With fruits and fertile promise, and the spring 
Come forth her work of gladness to contrive, 
With all her reckless birds upon the wing, * 

he furnishes a splendid example of genuine Imagination. It 
would then appear that Fancy evokes much less feeling and 
warmth than Imagination, that it embraces fainter and 
farther-fetched analogies, possesses less truthfulness, and deals 
with less pliant or indefinite objects than her elder sister. 
Fancy is more sportive; Imagination, more saturnine. The 
more natural sphere of the one is comedy; of the other, tragedy; 
though both can be grave and gay, according to the occasion 
upon which they are exercised, or the object calling them forth. 
Fancy in its lower range is employed in detecting analogies 
between the artificial . creations of society, in sharpening the 
edge of wit, in enduing the fashions and gaieties of town life 
with spiritual activity. In its higher range, it is employed about 
natural objects, and approaches the confines of Imagination. 
There is, however, a creative fancy as well as an imitative 
fancy ; and the order of creation, in whatever sphere employed, 
must always take precedence of that of imitation. With this 
restriction, the distinction between the higher and lower range 
of Fancy, may be taken as decisive of that between the merits 
of poetry of the inferior order ; for the lowest order of poetry is 
that entirely divorced from imagination in its primary poetical 

* " Childe Harold," c. hi. 



28 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

sense, being the sphere in which wit rules supreme. The next 
above it, is that in which Fancy is the paramount element 
combined with sparse flights of Imagination in its secondary 
poetical sense. 

The merit of poetry of the higher order may be discriminated 
in a similar manner, and so marked off from the inferior classes 
of the lower, by the character of the imaginative element pre- 
vailing therein. Creative imagination has its broadest range 
in the highest walks of the epic and dramatic muse. These, 
therefore, form a class apart. The next order would be that 
in which the Imagination in its secondary poetical sense, and 
in the non-creative range of its primary poetical sense, is para- 
mount ; which embraces second-rate dramas and epics, and the 
noblest productions of lyric, narrative, didactic, and satiric 
poetry. 

There is no mark more indicative of genius than the spon- 
taneous ease with which it mounts to general truths, from the 
ground of particular facts. The lower class of minds are so 
wedded to sensible phenomena that they seldom get beyond 
them. They may seize the features of a landscape, or strike off a 
particular group of figures with great accuracy, or combine into 
one piece fragmentary beauties which have struck them in 
nature. But to generalize from individual details, to rise to 
great truths from partial illustrations of them in external objects, 
to strike out of some grand synthetical principle its wide 
manifestations in individual phenomena, or to interweave the 
general with the particular in one variegated web of reasoning 
eloquence, — all this is beyond their competency. Take any play 
of Mason's or Thomson's, or any piece of Glover's or Southey's, 
and we may wade through miles of verse without meeting with 
an instance of the kind. But the pages of Byron and Shake- 
speare bristle with them. Read, for example, the noble reflections 
on Venice : 

The Suabian sued, and now the Austrian reigns — 
An Emperor tramples where an Emperor knelt, 



PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. 29 

Kingdoms are shrunk to provinces, and chains 
Clank over sceptred cities ; nations melt 
From power 's high pinnacle, when they have felt 

The sunshine for awhile, and downward go 
Likelauwine loosen, 'd from the mountain's belt : * 

Or see with what facility the same bard sculptures in verse the 
law which steeps the traditions of the dogeless city in undying 
freshness : 

The beings of the mind are not of clay ; 

Essentially immortal, they create 
And multiply in us a brighter ray 

And more beloved existence : That which Fate 
Prohibits to dull life, in this our state 

Of mortal bondage, by these spirits supplied, 
First exiles, then replaces what we hate, 
Watering the heart whose early flowers have died, 
And with a fresher growth replenishing the void, t 

Or behold how spontaneously the poet, after describing the 
ruins of the Imperial mount, rises, at a bound, to the circular 
theory of history : 

This is the moral of all human tales ; 

'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, 
First freedom, and then glory — when that fails, 

Wealth, vice, corruption, barbarism at last. 

And History with all her volumes vast 
Hath but one page % 

But a still more apposite example may be found in his 
enumeration of sweets, where he blends first love with the 
Hebrew account of the fall, and both with one of the sublimes t 

myths of antiquity : 

It stands alone, 
Like Adam's recollection of his fall ; 

The tree of Knowledge has been pluck'd, — all 's known, 
And life yields nothing further to recall 

Worthy of this ambrosial sin, so shown, 
No doubt in fable, as the unforgiven 

Fire which Prometheus filch'd for us from heaven. § 

* "Childe Harold," c. iv., st. 12. t Ibid, st. 5. 

% Ibid, st. 108. § "Don Juan," c. i., st. 127. 



30 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

In the plays of Shakespeare and of the higher dramatists, we 
are arrested by this felicitous combination of general, with 
particular truths, at every step. Thus, Hamlet cannot exchange 
words with Rosencrantz, in a bantering spirit, without enun- 
ciating a general principle upon which his remarks were 
founded : 

Ham. Denmark's a prison. 

Ros. Then is the world one. 

Ham. A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and 
dungeons, Denmark being one o' the worst. 

Ros. We think not so, my lord. 

Ham. Why, then, 'tis none to you ; for there is nothing either good or bad, 
but thinking makes it so. 

Ros. Why then your ambition makes it one ; 'tis too narrow for your mind. 

Ham. God! I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and call myself king of 
infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. 

And lower down, he cannot communicate to the same 
interlocutors the fact that he has abandoned his customary 
exercise, without soaring into a description which flushes the 
earth with ethereal radiance, and lifts man to the highest sphere 
of created intelligence.* 

Even when Hamlet chides his mother, the general and 
the particular blend their colours in a network of brilliant 
contrast : 

Assume a virtue, if you have it not. 

That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat, 

Of habits evil, is angel yet in this, 

That to the use of actions fair and good 

He likewise gives a frock or livery, 

That aptly is put on. Refrain to-night, 

And that shall lend a kind of easiness 

To the next abstinence : the next more easy ; 

For use almost can change the stamp of nature, 

And master e'en the devil, or throw hi?n out 

With wondrous potency, f 

An inferior artist, if he had introduced the king interrogating 
* Act ii., sc. 2. + Act iii., sc. i. 



PHIL OSOPHICAL ANAL YSIS. 3 1 

Hamlet about Polonius, would have simply garnished the 
interview with angry expostulations on both sides ; but Shake- 
speare makes this simple incident the occasion of a thesis upon 
human equality, expressed in a form democratic enough to 
have suited the taste of a Desmoulins or a Robespierre, by 
pointing to the chemical affinities which link the king with the 
beggar, and both with the lowest creatures of the earth. * 

Now, lesser poets never vitalize great principles by connecting 
them with particular incidents, or infuse philosophy into occa- 
sional incidents by mounting to the abstract truths from 
which they derive new force and meaning. The most they do 
is to start analogies, introduce similes and standards of com- 
parison, which occasionally beautify and enrich, but arTord a 
poor substitute for those majestic flights of genius which mount 
to the empyrean through successive cycles of being having 
their resting-point on earth. Akenside is a poet of tolerable 
repute. At least, his " Pleasures of the Imagination" is esteemed 
a British classic. But, though the subject of his poem was 
peculiarly adapted for flights of this character, he does not 
arTord a single instance of them.t In poets of this class, 
general truths are always misty and vague, because divorced 
from their individual manifestations, while these in turn fail to 
strike the mind with full significance, because they are dis- 
connected with the vital principle from which they derive their 
activity. It would appear that inferior poets lack that deep 
insight into the divine harmony of things which enables their 
superior brethren to trace back to their source the principles 
which control human action, or to pass with the sweep of an 
eagle through the vast immensities of being which connect the 
highest abstract intelligence with the lowest earthly existence. 
That ladder of principles, — the ascending and descending range 

* Act iv., sc. 3. 

t Except, indeed, a passage about the optical delusion of two suns in 
connection with the Newtonian theory of the rainbow, the finest in the 
poem, which, strange to say, was expunged after the first edition. 



32 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

of laws, whose foot is on the earth, but whose summit is in the 
skies, — can only be mounted by the upper ranks of the poetic 
hierarchy, affording, in this respect, a remarkable contrast to 
their weaker brethren who are unendowed with wings to poise 
themselves above the gross material atmosphere of the earth. 

The sublime is another source of poetic discrimination, but 
not so much between different species, as between the merits of 
poems of the same class. For sublimity is more or less common 
to poems of every species, though, in the higher walks of poetry, 
it is to be met with more frequently than in the lower. This 
necessarily arises from the nature of the case, as heroic characters, 
such as the epos and the drama call into life, require to be invested 
with grand conceptions, or surrounded with supernatural agents, 
who can only be represented by images which fill the imagination 
with terror, or overpower it with the idea of immensity. • Homer, 
when he introduces Juno hurrying on her chariot to battle, con- 
sidering the awful distance between heaven and earth, is obliged 
to make her steeds go at a pace which outstrips the lightning, 
and comprise within two leaps the limits of the physical horizon : 

For as a shepherd, from some point on high, 
O'er the wide main extends his boundless eye, 
Through such a space of air, with thundering sound, 
At one long leap, the immortal coursers bound. 

In the same way Milton, when he would impress the mind 
with the figure of Satan, puts into his hand a wand "tall as 
the mast of some high admiral," to support his steps over the 
burning marie, and gives him a shield as large as the moon, 
when viewed through a telescope in the most translucent of 
atmospheres. But when he would describe his hero drawing 
himself to his full height, nothing less than the tallest of moun- 
tains will furnish him with a standard of comparison : 
Satan alarm 'd, 

Collecting all his might, dilated stood, 

Like Teneriff or Atlas, unremoved ; 

His stature reach'd the sky, and on his crest 

Sat horror plumed. 



PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. 33 

But the storehouse of the sublime is not confined to the em- 
ployment of great images. The same feeling may be produced by 
any combination of thoughts which awakens deep pathos, which 
stirs the passions from their depths, or places us in connection 
with the infinite. There may be boldness and grandeur in the 
conception without any feeling of passion, as in the first two 
books of " Paradise Lost," just as there may be intense passion 
without any loftiness of ideas, as in the odes of Sappho. The 
one impresses the imagination, the other strikes at the heart. 
The combination of both is the peculiar privilege of the creative 
poet ; as, for instance, when he makes Orestes see the Furies so 
palpably, that the reader cannot help seeing them himself: 

Mad Orestes, when his mother's ghost 

Full in his face infernal torches tossed, 

And shook her snaky locks, he shuns the sight, 

Flies o'er the stage surprised with mortal fright, 

The Furies guard the door, and intercept his flight. 

Again, the feeling of the sublime may be produced without 
any effort of the imagination, but by a simple representation of 
fact ; as God said, " Let light be, and light was,'' or as in the 
noble lines of Pope on the justice of the Deity, — 

"Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, 
A hero perish or a sparrow fall ; 
Atoms or systems into ruins hurled, 
And now a bubble burst, and now a world. 

In the lower walks of poetry, the two elements which enter 
into these combinations of sublimity are commonly met with 
apart, — the intuitive sublime, which arises from notions of 
grandeur or immensity, being oftener met with in the descriptive, 
and the pathetic or emotional sublime, in the elegiac and lyric 
poet. In the lines of Pope on the death of an unfortunate young 
lady, and the ode of Gray on the massacre of the Welch bards, 
we get good exemplifications of the emotional ; in Thomson's 
description of the descent of the famished wolves from the Alps, 
on the approach of winter, an exemplification of the intuitive sub- 

3 



34 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

lime. But the sublimity of the descriptive genius, at the highest, 
is inferior to that of the creative genius at the lowest, as the 
imagination requires to be much more powerfully impressed to 
realize the mythical than the real. Compare the description of 
the thunderstorm in Thomson and the tempest in Falconer, with 
the description of the same phenomenon in " King Lear " and 
the " Odyssey." The one strikes the mind with the force of the 
hurricane itself. We are covered with foam. The hail pelts 
our faces. The thunder deafens our ears. We are driven by 
the force of the wind to and fro like the trees or masts which 
crackle above us. The other appears only the description of a 
picture which we contemplate from an artistic point of view. 
The creative poet has not only to soar higher, but to keep 
much longer on the wing. The descriptive poet need not soar 
at all, and when he does, never to anything like the same height ; 
and he drops from his airy eminence as quickly as he reached 
it. The flight of the one is that of the plover, who, cuffing the 
air with seemingly broken pinion, seldom loses sight of the 
corn-field in which he has enjoyed his last meal. The flight of 
the other that of the eagle, who, from some lofty peak in the 
Andes, dries his feathers in the unrisen sun, while the sleeping 
earth lies dark below. 

Even where there is neither grandeur in the naked concep- 
tion, or deep pathos in the feeling, or boldness in the thought, 
an impression akin to the sublime may be produced by an 
adroit use of figures of speech, when a metaphor or simile is 
made to illustrate a character more truthfully than the laboured 
narration of an entire life. Who does not see in the words 
Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Brutus, the hot and choleric, 
yet forgiving temper of the speaker ? — 

Oh, Cassius, thou art yoked with a lamb 
That carries anger as the flint bears fire ; 
Who, much enforced, yields a hasty spark, 
And straight is cold again. * 

* "Julius Csesar.," Act iv., sc. 3. 



PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS. 35 

Sometimes natural imagery, under the mask of metaphor, is 
called in to enforce a sentiment, with such elevation of thought, 
that we cannot refuse to the general effect the epithet of sub- 
lime. As when Apemantus tells Timon if he has betaken him- 
self to the country to find flatterers, he has gone to the wrong 
quarter : 

What, think'st thou 
That the bleak air, thy boist'rous chamberlain, 
Will put thy shirt on warm ? Will these moss'd trees, 
That have outlived the eagle, page thy heels, 
And skip, when thou point'st out ? Will the cold brook, 
Candied with ice, caudle thy morning taste, 
To cure thy o'er-night's surfeit ? Call the creatures, 
Whose naked natures live in all the spite 
Of wreakful heav'n, whose bare unhoused trunks, 
To the conflicting elements exposed, 
Answer mere nature ; bid them natter thee. * 

It is the infusion of this element of the sublime, in both or 
either of its two great branches, which distinguishes poetry of 
the second rank from other species of a lower order of merit, 
just as the prodigality of the creative element is the badge by 
which we distinguish poetry of the first order of merit. What- 
ever poetry is unleavened with the sublime, cannot be included 
in the second order, any more than poetry can be included in 
the first order, which has not a large infusion of the creative 
element. An ode or an elegy may be beautiful ; either may be 
exquisitely finished ; but if they excite no deep emotional 
feeling, or fill the mind with no lofty conceptions, we must, 
if we would observe a just gradation among the subjects of 
Parnassus, relegate what is merely beautiful without a spark of 
the creative element, to a third class sphere. The didactic, 
satiric, and narrative poem we would serve in the same manner, 
provided they were complete in every other respect except in 
profuse examples of sublimity. But as they frequently lack this 
element, with other qualities besides, it is evident the base of 
* Act iv., sc. 3. 



36 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

the poetic ranks cannot rest here. The ode and the elegy may 
want ideal finish, or objective imitation may be thrust too pro- 
minently forward, to the detriment of the subjective element, in 
which case the performance, out of regard to the third class of 
excellence, must rank beneath it. The other species of poetry 
in the third rank may be defective from the same cause. We 
hence get a fourth division, beyond which it would be unwise 
to go ; for, when the objective element rules paramount, to the 
exclusion of the subjective, we emerge from the region of poetry 
into that of fact, which, though invested with all the pomp of 
versification, remains fact still. The fourth division, therefore, 
as embracing a portion, though too little, of the ideal element, 
may be said to rest within the frontier line which divides poetry 
from the domains of objective reality. We, thus, find ourselves 
led into the same number of divisions with respect to the 
merits of poetry, as is frequently adopted for the classification 
of the poets of antiquity, when they are judged by the standard 
of the language in which they wrote, and which these poets 
themselves follow, when they describe epochs according to the 
degree of innocence or wickedness prevailing therein, as the 
golden, the silver, the brazen, and the iron age. 



CLASSIFICATION OF THE POETS. 37 



CHAPTER III. 

CLASSIFICATION OF THE POETS. 

ALL poets whose reputations have been fixed by universal 
suffrage in the most enlarged sense, will be found to have 
a rank assigned them in one of the four divisions just mentioned, 
according as the elements which characterize each division pre- 
dominate in their works. But a poet, to some extent, is as much 
a product of nature as a plant or a fossil; and nature never 
proceeds per saltum. We must, therefore, naturally expect the 
place of some few to rest on the boundary line, or to hang mid- 
way between two divisions without taking rank in either. It 
may also be premised that a poet may be first-class in his own 
peculiar province, and yet only second or third class when 
viewed in relation to the first division of poetry. Theocritus 
and Garcillasso are writers of pastorals of the highest order of 
merit, but the best pastorals exhibit a lack of creative power 
and the absence of sublimity. They, therefore, are necessarily 
excluded from the two first divisions, and can only rank in the 
third. Collins, again, is a first-class lyric ; but as the ode is much 
inferior to the epic, no one would think, on that account, of en- 
rolling Collins in the same rank as Shakespeare and Milton, as 
one of the monarchs of the spiritual universe. Poets of the 
same class have their place assigned to them in each of the 
divisions, much on the same principle as the divisions them- 
selves are constituted, viz., on account of the subservience of 
the fancy to the imagination, of the imitative to the creative 



38 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

element, and of the lower range of each of these to the higher, 
and the interfusion of the sublime with both. The only differ- 
ence is, that the distance between the divisions themselves is 
more marked from the lack of some peculiar quality, than that 
between poets of the same class, which only arises from the 
intensity or varying degree of the same quality. No one would 
place Virgil on a level with Homer, though he really has more 
grace, simply because there is less vigour and force in his 
original conceptions, and because he is more imitative in the 
lower sense ; nor Milton on a par with Shakespeare, for the 
same reason, although his characters unquestionably have more 
classical finish and more sustained dignity. But in any society, 
Milton would be placed above Pope, and Pope far more above 
Prior or Parnel, than Prior or Parnel is above Darwin or 
Hailey. And the chief assignable reason would be this, that 
Milton had more of the creative faculty than Pope, and that 
Pope familiarizes his readers with every branch of the sublime, 
while his mere imitators rarely do so with any. Nobody now, 
therefore, would think of placing either Parnel or Prior in the 
second division, or conferring upon them high rank in the 
third. But Collins and Burns each evince natural sweetness, 
Collins with a sublime imagination, Burns with infinite feeling 
and passion. They therefore rank in the second division as 
princes of lyric poetry. The works of Cowper and Thomson 
occasionally manifest sublimity, though not without apparent 
effort. Fancy, also, in their works, predominates over imagi- 
nation, and the poetry of objective, over that of representative 
imitation. They are, in fact, very high descriptive poets, but 
this only entitles them to the third rank in their art, being 
a second remove from Milton and Shakespeare. Goldsmith 
and Akenside, in the same division, supply the connecting 
link in the order of merit between Cowper and Thomson on 
the one side ; and such writers as Suckling and Herrick, or 
Falconer and Parnel, on the other side. The fourth class 
embraces poets like Glover and Mason, Addison and Ros- 



CLASSIFICATION OF THE POETS. 39 

common, in its higher range, and Hailey, Blackmore, and 
Darwin in the lower, whose works are characterized by the 
absence of original imagery, and the predominance of reflex 
imitation. While, if we descend to our laureates — Shadwell, 
Eusden, Cibber, and Pye — on account of the entire lack of the 
poetic element, I fear, though they made a considerable noise 
in their day, that posterity has made up its mind to treat them 
like a pack of charlatans, and turn them out of the Temple of 
the Muses altogether. 

The distinction between poetry of these various divisions 
will be found to lie as much in the difference of subject, as in 
the successful treatment of it. The best lyric and didactic 
piece not affording sufficient scope for the creative power, are 
necessarily excluded from the first division. The best descriptive 
piece, and the best pastoral, not affording sufficient scope for 
sublime passion or lofty imagination, are necessarily excluded 
from the second rank. It would, therefore, naturally follow that 
a second-rate descriptive poem and pastoral would fall into 
the fourth rank, and a second-rate lyric or didactic poem in 
the third rank, and a second-rate drama or epic in the second 
rank. But as the highest species of poetry, viz., the epos 
and the drama, combine more poetic elements than the 
lower, they will be found in every grade according to the 
powers of invention, imagination, or imitation they manifest, 
taking rank within the division to which their merit belongs. 
Massinger, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson by no means exhibit the 
same plastic power as Shakespeare. Their pieces rank, however, 
in consistency of parts, in imaginative passion, in lofty instances 
of sublimity, as far above the plays of Ford, of Peele, of 
Greene, of Middleton, of Otway, quite as much as the pieces 
of these dramatists rank above the "Sophonisba" of Thomson, 
the "Zanga" of Young, or the "Elfrida" and "Caractacus" 
of Mason. I, therefore, place them, along with Beaumont 
and Fletcher, in the second class, while I relegate the plays 
of the two inferior orders of dramatists to the third and 



40 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

fourth divisions, according to the degree in which they com- 
bine imagination with fancy, or mere imitation with the repre- 
sentative faculty. Peele, Ford, Otway, and Webster have, how- 
ever, written plays which belong to the third as well as the 
second order of poetry. They may, therefore, be regarded as 
waverers between the two divisions. But Greene, Marston, and 
Shirley belong exclusively to the third order of dramatists, from 
their lack of passion and imaginative sublimity. While nothing 
in the nature of plays which Mason, Young, Thomson, or 
Addison has produced, could rescue them from the lowest rank 
in the dramatic art, on account of the redundancy they exhibit 
of reflex imitation. 

The credentials of poets of the highest rank are, perhaps, less 
exposed to challenge than any other, as the exercise of the 
creative faculty in its higher range, results in effects so unique 
as to enchain our admiration for ever. They carry about with 
them a magician's wand which calls up characters destined to 
haunt the memories of all coming generations. These are the 
poets of the creative order. That which to other poets is the 
model, becomes as it were the slave of their imagination, sup- 
plying it with types which they transfuse into a higher order of 
intelligence. Their creations are, also, upon a scale of grandeur 
which overleaps the bounds of space and time within which 
the ordinary imagination is confined. Shakespeare, Homer, 
Dante, and Milton manifest the power of sublime invention in 
so prominent a degree as to make it the most conspicuous 
feature in their works. Mankind have therefore been wonder- 
fully concurrent in placing them in the front rank of the highest 
division of poetry. In the lower range of the same charmed 
circle, the three Greek tragedians* have generally found not an 
unchurlish reception. Though their works have come down 
to us in a very mutilated state, and though the people who 
alone could fully appreciate their merits have long since been 
shattered into dust, the impress which they left upon the 
* ^Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. 




CLASSIFICATION OF THE POETS. 41 

highly-gifted minds of the most fastidious age of Greece, and 
the magnificent torsos in which their genius is imperfectly 
reflected, fully entitle them to that distinction. For their 
Orestes, Antigones, Clytemnestras, and Pylades still suffuse the 
world with ancient light, and bring each coming generation 
within reach of the primitive age, when the cries of the Bacchae 
startled the nymphs in the groves of Arcady, and mariners 
encountered the barks of the gods in the ^Egean Sea. In their 
dramas the creative is the principal element, combined with 
bold imagination or exquisite pathos. After Homer and Shake- 
speare, their works are the least tainted in any form with reflex, 
and abound with the loftiest examples of ideal imitation. They 
are, therefore, entitled to rank next' after the first great masters 
of creative imagination. In the lowest group of the first division, 
I would place Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso. For, though each of 
these poets is distinguished by sublime inventions, though 
they afford many superb examples of creative imagination, they 
each adopt the conceptions of their predecessors to so large 
an extent, as to place them at a respectable distance from 
their circle. Virgil, however, notwithstanding his habit of 
copying Homer whenever he gets an opportunity, is dis- 
tinguished by exquisite grace, by subtile strokes of passion 
infusing life and warmth into all his characters, and by the 
power of calling up marvellous pictures by a few strokes of his 
pencil. Ariosto and Tasso are generally allowed to bear him 
company by all who enjoy the pleasure of their acquaintance, 
without the introduction of such sorry versifiers as Hoole, 
Fairfax, or Harrington. Ariosto, though most unlike the Greek 
tragedians in other respects, resembles them in this, that his. 
genius has reproduced an age which can never die as long as 
his language is understood. If behind the other creative poets 
in grandeur of conception, he certainly is not surpassed by any 
in fertility of invention, in depth of passion, or in the fidelity of 
his portraits to nature. The blending of the grave with the 
gay, of the comic with .. the pathetic, — a mode of treatment 



42 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

forced upon him by the sceptical spirit of his age, which had 
lost all belief in the supernatural* — though it subtracts from 
that terrible earnestness which characterizes the works of his 
rivals, affords greater scope and variety to his powers, and 
enables him to strike monotony out of his narrative. To my 
mind, Tasso is barely within the circle of the great epic poets ; 
for he stands as much below Dante and Homer as he is above 
Camoens, and as much above Camoens, as Camoens is above 
Lucan, or as much as Lucan is above Davenant and Sir 
Richard Blackmore. At least, such is the position he holds 
in the general repute, notwithstanding the too eulogistic 
judgment of Lord Byron, and the too depreciatory judgment 
of Despreau and Boileau. For he is behind his great com- 
peers in boldness of conception, in sublimity, as well as in 
fertility of incident and originality of invention ; though he 
need not fear comparison with the foremost in delineation 
of character, and in moulding a fable of heterogeneous 
parts into the unity of a perfect whole. To test his inferiority 
to Milton and Dante, the Pandemonium of either should 
be compared with the infernal council of Pluto. Milton's and 
Dante's devils are dethroned spirits, fallen meteors flashing 
through a dark atmosphere, ruined ministers carrying about 
with them the pomp of their former state, while splashing 
us with their fiery talk, or hurling defiance at the gates 
of heaven. But Tasso's devils are contemptible reptiles pro- 
vided with horns and tails like those drawn by our grandams 
to congeal us by the winter fire. As a mark of his inferiority 
to Ariosto, the coquettish manners of Armida may be con- 
trasted with the voluptuous sensibility of Alcina, and the 
sanctimonious demureness of Sofronia with the tacit spirituality 
of Angelica, and the studied proprieties of Clorinda with the 
passionate tenderness of Olympia. The creative, in Tasso, is 
not by any means so prominent as the representative faculty, 
and in the strength of both, he is below his Italian rival. 
On account of the frequency of his imitations, and the 



CLASSIFICATION OF THE POETS. 43 

exquisite finish of his pictures, Tasso more nearly approaches 
Virgil than any other epic poet, though he rarely attains ; 
even by redundant touches, to that height of the sublime which 
the Roman reaches by a few masterly strokes. Tasso, however, 
excels Virgil in discrimination of character, in imparting to his 
heroes an earnest reality of purpose, as well as in the manipula- 
tion of his fable, and in sustaining the interest of his narrative 
to the end. It would, therefore, be unjust to shut the door upon 
the Neapolitan, where the Mantuan has been admitted. But 
these are excellences of the narrative rather than the epic poet, 
for which reason Tasso may be regarded as marking the 
boundary-line between the representative and creative order of 
poetry. 

Tasso lies so near the frontier which divides the great creative 
poets from those of the next, or representative rank, as to afford 
no room for his imitator, Spenser, to be included in the number. 
In suffusing a landscape with rosy light so as to mass its colours 
in startling contrasts, and in imparting to his scenery the grace 
and harmony of a Claude, the Englishman may be said to 
surpass his Italian contemporary. He is, also, his superior in 
that indefinable sweetness which always accompanies ideal 
beauty ; but in depth of feeling, in animated action, in delinea- 
tion of character, in the invention of incidents to awaken and 
keep alive the curiosity of the reader, in making variety in the 
parts of his fable so cohere as to impart strength and unity to 
the whole, — in all of these Tasso is unquestionably his master. 
The "Faerie Queen" presents us with a succession of pictures 
of great power, tricked out with inimitable charms of grace and 
sentiment, but without any connecting link sufficiently promi- 
nent to present them to the reader as members of one grand 
design. We are charmed with isolated fragments — with that 
pretty prospective, with this woodland group, with this bewitch- 
ing etching of an angel supporting a wounded knight, with 
the voluptuous beauty of that nymph mocking the satyr by 
plunging into the concealing wave, with that scene of blushing 



44 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Diana, hemmed in by her nymphs, when surprised by the wanton 
Faun at her bath — just as we are horrified by the savage and 
wild scenery he piles up round this cave of despair, and thai 
den of slander, with the filthy duessas and toad-like witches 
he congregates therein ; but amidst all these representations, 
we are quite oblivious of the poet's fable, simply because 
he is ignorant of what is the chief art of the creative poet, viz., 
the keeping alive in the parts of his design the dominant idea 
which ought to animate the whole. Spenser, therefore, is much 
praised and little read. There are very few who do not open 
his volumes at random, but very few who sit down with the 
resolution to read him through, and still fewer who continue in 
that resolution to the end. The fact is, the fate of Spenser's 
characters do not interest us, because they do not wear the sem- 
blance of living realities, which arises partly from the mistaken 
idea of making them the embodiment of some abstract con- 
ception, and piling allegory upon allegory until we are lost in 
a wilderness of personification. Besides, Spenser has stolen a 
whole armoury of conceits from Tasso, and plundered Ariosto of 
entire cantos of his immortal epic, which he deliberately trans- 
ferred to the "Faerie Queen." Reflex imitation and direct 
thievery on so extensive a scale are surely not to be ascribed to 
a genius of the highest order. In Spenser, also, fancy oftener 
supplies the place of the imaginative element than is her wont 
with the poet whom he so flagrantly copies. It is for these 
reasons that I think Spenser ought to be excluded from the 
last range of creative poets, though his great qualities un- 
questionably entitle him to a very high place among poets of 
the succeeding or representative division. 

Chaucer is usually ranked with Spenser, as the forte of each lay 
in the representative faculty, and both seem to revel in joyous 
pictures of external nature, as a sort of background to their 
subjects. But Chaucer, though possessed of greater abilities than 
Spenser, did not soar higher than the narrative poem, in which he 
attained perfection. The characters in the " Canterbury Tales " 



CLASSIFICATION OF THE POETS. 45 

are drawn with the hand of a master, and placed in advantageous 
contrast, so as to strike the eye with rich masses of colouring. 
The nun and the friar, the squire and the lawyer, jogging along 
with the merchant and the handicraft-man, while they lay bare 
to its foundations the structure of contemporary society, which 
the Church had almost rendered communistic, impress our 
minds as much with the realities of individual life as if the 
portraits were the same objective copies as his description of 
the parlour furniture at the Tabard. But in these, as in his 
other tales, he makes little use of the inventive faculty, their 
principal merit consisting in portraying lively sallies of cha- 
racter, instead of surprising the reader by startling creations. In 
"Troilus and Cresseide" Chaucer had more scope for invention, 
but he has not availed himself of it. The tale abounds with 
touches of emotional sublimity, and exquisite descriptions of 
nature, but is enriched with, little incident beyond what is in 
the original tale itself. Between the story as detailed by 
Chaucer, and what it subsequently became in the hands of 
Shakespeare, we may perceive the wide distance which separates 
the creative from the mere representative poet. But let us be 
just to the Father of English Poetry. A poet is more or less the 
product of his age. Had Shakespeare lived in the fourteenth 
century, his colossal powers would have been, to a great extent, 
stunted in their growth ; and the perfection which Chaucer at- 
tained, though in a second-class walk of his art, in the infancy 
of our language, is one of the greatest marvels of literary history. 
If he has achieved less in the imaginative element than Spenser, 
or than either of his Italian rivals, the probability is, had he 
enjoyed the advantages of their training, and been born to the 
inheritance of free thought which they enjoyed, he would have 
outshone even the splendour of their genius. 

Spenser excels Camoens in the brilliancy and copiousness 
of imagery, in the variety, the flow, the energy, and the swell of 
his versification, in sustained sweetness, and inimitable grace of 
manner, as far indeed as we would naturally expect a refined 



46 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

courtier to surpass a rude soldier in polished ease and elegance ; 
but the English poet is inferior to his Portuguese contemporary 
in boldness and originality of invention, as well as in the art of 
shaping out of diverse materials the structural unity of a grand 
poem. Camoens, instead of narrating, as an inferior poet 
would, the events of Vasco de Gama's voyage in their natural 
sequence, rushes at once into the middle of his subject, opening 
his epic with the gods assembled in council, and the hardy 
Lusitanians upon the threshold of a new world. The appalling 
phantom which arrests the Portuguese fleet at the Cape, and 
the island which arises out of the African sea, for the solace of 
the mariners, have excited the imagination of posterity as much 
as the boldest strokes of invention in Homer and Virgil. But 
the wearisome recitals of history, and the geographical details 
with which he crams his two chief episodes, with the want of 
vraisemblance in his supernatural machinery, must prevent this 
poet from rising above the second rank in his art, though 
Schlegel has the hardihood to place him before Tasso. It 
cannot, however, be denied that Camoens' defects spring not so 
much from lack of genius as the want of ordinary judgment. 
The narrative details might easily have been replaced by some 
device of his powerful imagination; and by keeping the pagan 
in subordination to the Christian element, his supernatural ma- 
chinery would not have startled his Catholic readers out of all 
feelings of propriety. 

The Catholic theology frequently refers the Greek legends to 
the invention of devils, who, by embodying the passions in 
sensual forms, sought to keep the human race from the worship 
of the deity. Camoens himself represents this tradition to the 
letter, when he introduces Bacchus, in the guise of a Roman 
Catholic priest, endeavouring to mislead the Christian navi- 
gators, that they might not interfere with his empire. Had 
Camoens always employed his pagan characters as the minis- 
trants of evil, he would have found a legitimate field for their 
enterprise; but he goes far beyond this in placing the two 



CLASSIFICATION OF THE POETS. 47 

systems exactly upon a level. God the Father and Venus 
can by no freak of the imagination be associated in the same 
undertaking. Yet the Paphian goddess is represented by 
Camoens as acting in collusion with Jehovah, in order to in- 
flame the Nereids with love for the Portuguese, and as em- 
ploying the arrows of Cupid for the propagation of the true faith. 
Such a grotesque blending of the voluptuous forms of the old 
mythology with the austere agents of the Christian faith, is as 
much at war with nature as the embodiment of abstract passions, 
and the employment of them as dramatic personages in an 
heroic poem. Naturalness is the great link which binds the 
ideal to the actual. Without verisimilitude fiction can take no 
hold upon the imagination. But what likeness to nature can 
there be in devices which shock popular belief, and outrage all 
our notions of reality ? 

The " Henriade" sinks naturally enough deep into the third- 
rate order of poetry, not simply from its comparative inferiority 
to the other great epics, but from the lack of invention and 
the predominance of the imitative, over the creative faculty. 
All the reader gets in Voltaire's epic is the framework of a 
great design, which the maker had not the faculty to fill up 
with anything but buckram personages, who may charm us with 
fine sentiments, but do not in the least interest us in then- 
actions. It is a fine poem, which presents us with no new 
combinations, but merely springs out of the novel association 
of the devices of others. The principal element in the ma- 
chinery arises from the lowest order of imitations. In fact, all 
that Voltaire has accomplished in the way of originality is to 
personify fury, discord, and politics ; who, each in their several 
spheres, the one in hell, the other in Paris, and the last in 
Rome, perform the principal feats upon which the action of the 
poem turns. But the mind can never, by any art, be seduced 
into the belief that these personages are anything more thai? 
abstract passions, and to make them pass for realities, is as 
difficult a task as to change the cardinal virtues into ' animals. 



48 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Hence, Homer and Virgil showed their sense in keeping such 
license within proper bounds. Their personification of slander 
and fame is only to show the extent to which such things grow 
out of small trifles. They never thrust them forward, like Spenser, 
into the heart of an action, or make them the moving agents of 
a plot on which the progress of the piece depends. They are 
mere figures of speech, and nothing more. Even Milton, with 
all his genius, and with the forms of monumental sculpture to 
help him, when he introduces sin and death parleying with Satan 
at the gates of hell, makes a call upon our imagination to which 
credulity cannot respond. We, therefore, lose all interest in a 
piece which employs agents of a more abstract nature as its 
principal characters, since the actions which they stimulate arise 
out of causes not conformable with nature. 

Virgil and Tasso, the most imitative of the epic poets, have 
many inventions which are original. Even the sublime phan- 
tom which encounters the fleet of Vasco de Gama while 
doubling the Cape, or the isle of the Nereids arising out of the 
ocean, in Camoens, have not their prototype in any other poet. 
But it is impossible to lay a finger upon any of the devices in 
the " Henriade " which has not its counterpart in some other 
poet. Henry IV. is detained in the bower of love, as Rinaldo 
in the gardens of Armida. Henry IV. is conducted into hell 
like ^Eneas, where he is made to see, as Bradamante in the cave 
of Merlin, the illustrious progenitors who are to spring from his 
loins. This injudicious environment of a modern hero with the 
myths, suited only to legendary history, strikes, as it were, with 
atrophy the imaginative parts of the poem. Voltaire, like 
Lucan, had the misfortune to select a subject for an epic too 
close to the period in which he wrote ; but the Roman showed 
more discernment than the Frenchman, in keeping his characters 
out of regions in which they could not appear, without drawing 
upon their heads the ridicule of a sceptical generation. Lucan 
is inferior to his French imitator in the artistic manipulation of his 
fable, because he abounds in objective imitation, or, in other words, 



CLASSIFICATION OF THE POETS. 49 

sticks so closely to the world of fact, and intrudes upon his reader 
so many needless scientific digressions. But there cannot be a 
doubt, in earnestness of purpose, in pomp of language, in discrimi- 
nation of character and dignity of sentiment, he is Voltaire's supe- 
rior. He may also be regarded as his superior in the inventive 
faculty ; for, while the invention of Voltaire is only shown in 
throwing into new combinations the images of others, that of 
Lucan springs from placing old characters in strange situations, 
so affording scope for novel incidents, and enabling him to bring 
out their salient features by startling varieties of contrast. In 
both, however, the descriptions are too melodramatic, the senti- 
ments too spasmodic for the chaste simplicity of truth. I, there- 
fore, set down the " Pharsalia," as well as the " Henriade," in 
the lower division of the third order of poetry, relegating Glover's 
" Leonidas " and " Athenaid " to the same division in the fourth 
order, where their empty stateliness, their lack of original 
imagery, well befits both to find a place. 

The narrative poem is the evolution of a single skein of fic- 
tion, as contradistinguished from the epic and dramatic poem, 
which interweave the thread of several such groups into the 
unity of one grand design. In passing, then, from epic and 
dramatic poetry, we necessarily descend into a lower region 
of art, wherein the best poets must be content to figure 
as second class, relatively to those who have exercised,, upon 
a grand scale, the wand of creation with the grasp of a 
master. Even the moral, lyric, or didactic poet, however 
excellent his merits, can never expect to attain the same 
level as a Homer or a Milton. He may have faculties 
which, as in the case of Chatterton, Chaucer, or Burns, might 
have enabled him to vie with the loftiest muse in the creative 
region ; but if circumstances have not favoured their cultiva- 
tion, his merits cannot be tested by what he has not produced. 
The " Battle of Hastings " and " Tam o'Shanter" are narrative 
poems of the very highest class, which prove their authors to 
have been in possession of great inventive powers, but as these 

4 



50 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

have not been exercised upon any grand scale, both Chatterton 
and Burns must be excluded from the first walk of their art. 
Perhaps, no writer of the English language was so competent as 
Dryden to execute a great epic — at least, if we may judge from 
the manner in which he has developed some of Boccacio's 
stories, and amplified what he undertook to recast from Chaucer. 
But this great poet was doomed to cater to the false taste ot 
the public, by wasting his strength upon wretched rhyming tra- 
gedies, which were no sooner acted than forgotten. Dryden, 
then, as well as Chaucer — the one from the necessities of his 
position, the other from those of his age — may be said to have 
evinced powers capable of higher things than they achieved ; 
but this would not justify us in placing them among poets of 
the first class, except in those departments which they have 
illustrated by their genius. 

It is for his relative, and not absolute inferiority, that Pope is 
also excluded from the first division ; for while, from the nature 
of his subjects, he cannot rank with Milton, he is fairly allowed 
to be at the head of the moral poets of England. In the heroic 
comic poem, he certainly has no rival out of Italy. The 
machinery of his " Rape of the Lock," were it not for the 
burlesque character of the piece, would go far to establish his 
pretensions to rank with the loftiest masters of song. Out of 
the circle of epic and dramatic writers, no poet has tried so 
many kinds of subjects, and succeeded so well in all. In the 
ode, Collins is superior to him ; but Collins expended almost 
his whole strength on this description of poetry. In slashing 
strength of satire, he is surpassed by Dryden and Churchill ; 
but Dryden and Churchill choose satire for their peculiar pro- 
vince ; while Pope, though pre-eminent in satire, has written the 
best descriptive poem, " Windsor Forest," the first moral, and 
two of the best didactic poems, in our language, the " Essay on 
Criticism," and the " Essay on Man." In the pathetic-sublime, 
the " Epistle of Abelard to Eloisa " has never been surpassed, 
and rarely, if ever, been equalled. In the intuitive branch of the 






CLASSIFICATION OF THE POETS. 51 

sublime, the "Messiah" and the "Essay on Man" afford as 
many striking examples as any other pieces of equal extent. 
I, therefore, do not think Pope misplaced where the public have 
generally agreed to place him, after Chaucer and Spenser, at 
the head of the poets of the second division of the representa- 
tive class. After him ranks Dryden ; after Dryden, at least in 
satire, the unjustly neglected Churchill. 

We have cited frequent examples of the intuitive and 
emotional-sublime, as the touchstone by which poetry of the 
second order may be distinguished from that of a lower range. 
Tried by this test, Pope, Dryden, and Churchill will be found 
as distinguished as Horace and Juvenal. Many of Shakespeare's 
dramatic contemporaries and immediate successors soar into 
the region of the sublime without constrained effort, and 
Collins, also, evinces no lack of vigour in the same element. 
But Gray, who is generally classed with him, has not one 
spark of Collins' exquisite feeling. His imagery is cold and 
stately, reminding us rather of antique statuary than the 
animated action of human life. Hence, the intuitive-sub- 
lime with him, though easily attained, is too definite to be 
of a high order. His noblest conceptions rather resemble the 
figures on a Greek frieze than those ideal embodiments which 
place us in connection with the infinite. On this account, 
Gray's place is on the boundary line which divides the second 
from the third class of poets, if he be not actually within it. 
Lucretius excels in what may be called the discursive-sublime, 
that arising out of deep reflection, recondite analogies, and 
brilliant sentiment, his exemplifications of which may vie with 
anything of the sort in the " Essay on Man." He is the 
poet of reason in its profoundest sense. Petrarch, Sappho, 
and Ovid, on the other hand, excel in a branch of the sublime 
which requires less sustained effort but more natural genius. 
They are the grand masters of love, both in its spiritual 
and voluptuous aspects — a passion which is never accurately 
delineated without stirring the human heart from its lowest 



52 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

depths. The second division, therefore, may be said to 
contain as many groups as the first division contains single 
poets, each varying in merit, but all bound together by excel- 
lence in one common quality. Spenser and Chaucer bound 
the line on the creative frontier, while the base of the division, 
on the representative frontier, terminates with Gray. 

The best description which can be given of poetry of the 
third order is that which would identify it with poetry of the 
second order, were it not for lack of the element of sublimity, 
and the power of combining particular incidents with general 
principles. Both classes of poets equally use material objects 
only as chords to awaken within us the inner harmonies of our 
spiritual being ; but the higher are led by their subjects into bold 
flights of imagination, the lower into excursions of fancy. In 
the same proportion as fancy occupies the place of imagination, 
external imitation, with poets of the third order, encroaches 
on the ground of the representative faculty. The poets of this 
class never stir the passions to any extent, but touch with 
masterly hand the refined sensibilities of our nature. They 
are more distinguished for exquisite taste than depth of feeling. 
I, therefore, denominate them poets of the aesthetic order, in con- 
tradistinction to poets of the creative and representative order. 
Such are Cowper, Thomson, and Goldsmith, who stand at 
the head of this division. Their subjects, as in the "Traveller" 
and " Deserted Village," generally make up for boldness and 
originality of conception by a keen sense of beauty and by 
elaborate finish. But when on a large scale, like the " Task," 
the treatment is fragmentary, or the tone is unequal, as in the 
" Seasons," whose beauties, like the spring sun, only shine out 
by fitful gleams. Their pieces, however, when on a small 
scale, have the perfection of gems, or painting on enamel. 
Herrick belongs to the middle group of poets of this class; 
so do Falconer, Drayton, and Cowley, though in different 
spheres. Blair and Young, Prior and Parnel, occupy the lower 
region of it. Gay and Denham bring up the the rear. 



CLASSIFICATION OF THE POETS. 53 

The peculiar subjects of this third division are pure descrip- 
tive, pastoral, and ballad poetry. In pastoral we do not 
flourish so much as our southern neighbours ; for our churlish 
climate will not allow us to place Amaryllas and Corydons 
under orange-groves or fig-trees, and our swains appear to 
bad advantage after the plastic creatures of Greek imagination. 
Tickell, Mallet, and Shenstone — the two former by their 
ballads, and the last by a few of his pastoral eclogues and his 
"Village Schoomistress," — belong to this division of poetry, 
though the great bulk of their other poems would assign them 
a place in the fourth class. They therefore, like Gray, rest on 
the frontier, or like Chaucer, Dryden, Pope, and Burns, may 
be denominated waverers, or poets who, while they belong to 
an inferior division, evince talents which, if properly directed, 
would have raised them to a higher rank. 

The distinction between poetry of the third and fourth order 
is not difficult to seize. It is in fact the distinction between 
mixed imagination and fancy, and fancy alone ; between deri- 
vative and direct imitation; between the spiritual and the 
material, as confined to those writers who never soar to the sub- 
lime, but whose merit consists in elegance of expression and 
accuracy of objective description. The poets of the third 
rank use the material as an introduction to the spiritual, those 
of the fourth rank, the spiritual as the handmaid to the material. 
They may, therefore, be denominated poets of the sensuous 
order. In the description of the one, the spiritual element is 
always uppermost, moulding the material to its purposes, till it 
claims a close kinship with the offsprings of the imagination. 
In the descriptions of the other, the sensuous predominates ; 
the poet throwing into prominence the corporeal qualities of 
objects, rather than seeking to impress the mind through the 
imagination and the heart. Take as an illustration Herrick and 
Carew. Both have left us animated portraits of female beauty. 
But in Herrick, the features are only known through the inner 
light, which uses them as a vase for the manifestation of its 



54 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

splendour ; while in Carew, we get a combination of material 
properties only, without any spiritual significance. Poets of 
this class abound in stereotyped phrases and figures of speech, 
which have not an atom of originality. Clever city wits, 
like Suckling, Waller, Swift, and Rochester, hold the highest rank 
among them. The next in order, though in a different sphere, 
are such writers as Beattie, Glover, and the two Wartons. 
The middle region is occupied by Addison, Garth, Fenton, 
and Roscommon; and in the direct boundary line we meet 
with Hailey and Darwin. All beyond are mere versifiers, of 
whom we can take no account. If a man chooses to master 
chemistry, and throw the facts of that science into pleasing 
pentameters, that does not make him the less a chemist and 
more of a poet. Empedocles, when he threw his natural his- 
tory into verse, still remained a naturalist. Otherwise, we 
should have pedagogues climbing up the hill of Parnassus, with 
the Latin grammar in rhyme on their back. The metre is but 
the dress that constitutes the framework of the poet's limbs, 
and the inner soul which animates them, is the power he possesses 
of entering into the inner shrine of the universe, and revealing 
the occult harmonies of the spiritual sphere, which permeate 
all material forms, and make this great globe itself but the ex- 
ternal embodiments of its splendour. But in Broome, Ham- 
mond, Sandys, Pitt, Whitehead, Cumberland, Shadwell, and the 
Laureates who intervened between the two, and in the whole 
tribe of Pope's second class imitators, we can discover nothing 
of the true functions of the poet, but only the external wrapper 
or form, which can no more exalt prosaic conceptions, than 
the lion's skin could endue with ferocity the servile beast who 
clad himself therewith to frighten the denizens of the forest. 

So far, then, it may be taken for an axiom, that where we get 
great creative power, many-sidedness, and a conjunction of 
grand conceptions with the emotional sublime, there we have 
first class poetry, and where any of these qualities are wanting, 
first class poetry is not. It may also be as readily granted, that 



CLASSIFICATION OF THE POETS. 55 

the class of poetry next in order is where there is a lack of 
creative power, but frequent instances of either of the two 
sources of the sublime combined with a prominent manifesta- 
tion of the representative faculty. From this level the next 
step in the descent to the third or aesthetic order, is the 
rarity of any instance of the sublime, with great vigour of 
description, in which the spiritual dominates over the material. 
The lowest step of all lands us on that ground where we get 
inferior combinations of the imaginative and representative 
elements in second-rate descriptive poetry, and where flights of 
fancy and sallies of wit are substituted for sublime bursts of 
passion, and the spiritual manifestations of beauty. This is not 
the sphere of ethereal types, but of material embodiments. 
Beyond the frontier of this sensuous region, we come in contact 
with the dreary wastes of the actual, in which most common- 
place characters are content to spin out the great bulk of their 
lives. 



56 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



CHAPTER IV. 

INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

WHAT are the relations of genius to the age in which it 
appears ? How far do they mutually influence each 
other ? Is it necessary for the production of a great poet 
that the age in which he lives should be strongly tinctured with 
romance, or contain within it a dash of the marvellous ? 
Such are some of the questions which are often arbitrarily 
decided, or in fact assumed to be solved, upon insufficient 
grounds. There are two or three generally admitted facts in 
connection with this matter. Every age, to a greater or less 
extent, impresses certain marks upon the writers belonging to 
it. The writers of Queen Anne may be easily distinguished 
from those of the Restoration, and both in turn from the writers 
of the Elizabethan period. It has also been noted that, during 
four or five great world-epochs, the human intellect has appeared 
in far greater force than at any other times. The great lumina- 
ries of the intellectual horizon have not been distributed equally 
over certain even portions of time, but have clustered round 
periods which have been most distinguished for aesthetic refine- 
ment, for startling social change, or for grand political culmina- 
tions. It may, also, be admitted that the poets of the highest 
creative genius have flourished before science achieved its con- 
quests, and before men's minds were engrossed by practical 



INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERISTICS. 57 

pursuits, or disciplined by philosophic thought. When the 
fields of Nature lay for the most part unexplored, and when 
men were guided more by their emotions and acute sensibili- 
ties than by their practical reason, the imagination attained 
its highest flights into the regions of the unknown. Then 
were moulded, in the poetic armoury, those shafts which 
have sunk deepest in the human breast. Homer flourished 
m the infancy of the ancient, Dante in the infancy of the 
modern, world. Shakespeare and his dramatic contemporaries 
preceded, if they did not prepare, the way for those scientific 
discoveries which culminated in Newton. Ariosto flourished 
before Galileo, who candidly confesses his obligations to a 
writer. whose pursuits were so opposite to his own. Milton lived 
at a later period, but his mind was alien to those inductive 
processes which were then beginning to lay the foundations of 
modern science. If France and Germany have produced no 
poets fit to contend with those of England and Italy in the 
highest walks of creative genius, it would appear because their 
philosophers had the start of their poets. Descartes pre- 
ceded Corneille ; and the German metaphysicians, before Goethe 
or Schiller appeared, had thrown back many of the veils which 
hide, in their dim, mysterious folds, the arcana of man's spiritual 
nature. 

Upon some such grounds as these, it has been determined 
that a writer is but the organic expression of the voice of his 
age, and that if the times in which he lives be prosaic, his 
utterances must, in the main, be prosaic also. But a great 
poet, though to some extent the product of his age, is, by 
the irresistible attributes of his greatness, raised so far 
above it as to be regarded as a seer, directing his contempo- 
raries into the fertile regions of the future, and illuminating his 
own times with a splendour with which they have little in com- 
mon. It may, indeed, be a question how far such a mind can 
expand in an atmosphere spiritually stagnant, in an age which 
evinces no signs of motion except that of plunging backwards. 



58 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

But, unquestionably, a poet born in such an age, who, instead of 
infusing into it higher instincts, simply reproduces in his works 
its existing tendencies, can hardly be called "great" in the proper 
sense of that term. To entitle a writer to that appellation, it 
is essential that he dominate his age, no matter however high 
may be its intellectual level. But if that intellectual level be 
low, the loftier must be the region, the higher the distance at 
which he soars above it. All poets exemplify the breadth or 
contraction of their genius, in proportion as they dominate their 
age, or merely reproduce its elements. The Restoration poets, 
who reflected the dissolute tendencies of their age, or the 
poets of James I., who mirrored forth its pedantic conceits, or 
the poets of Anne, whose pages are merely an echo of the French 
taste of the time, do not occupy a high shelf in our literature. 
But Milton stood aloof from the bacchanalian revels of his 
contemporary brethren, and wrote his great epic with his ears 
only open to the harmonies of the spheres ; and Shakespeare 
and his dramatic contemporaries looked down with similar 
contempt upon the controversial fanaticism which comprised the 
main intellectual ferment of their day, their vision being absorbed 
by that insight into the beauty of the spiritual universe 
with which they have enriched all time. There was nothing 
in the Georgian era to stimulate the rapture of Collins ; but, on 
the contrary, an amount of German phlegm and dullness calcu- 
lated to nip it in the bud. Yet the poet, if we follow the sub- 
lime bursts of imaginative passion with which he illuminated a 
blind age, seems to have breathed an atmosphere of fire and 
air. Burns' brief manhood was surrounded by the blighting 
spectres of a fanatical religion, but he soared beyond them into 
the sphere of living reality. His whole existence was a protest 
against the prosaic conventionalities which attempted to stifle 
his splendid genius. A great writer may exercise little or no 
influence over his contemporaries, as they may be too dull or 
too prejudiced to appreciate or comprehend him ; but if he 
allows himself to be dominated by them, it is an infallible sign 



INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERISTICS. 59 

of intellectual weakness. When the age, in which a great poet 
lives, is filled with striking revolutions which change religions or 
subvert dynasties, or which overpower the mind by letting 
loose the floodgates of thought, or fill it with tragic images of 
terror or pity, he may contemplate the scene in seclusion, and, 
nevertheless, feel himself carried away by the current. But if 
the times be stagnantly dull, it rarely, if ever, happens that a great 
poet can pass his days in retirement, without experiencing such 
a break in his fortunes, as is calculated to rouse his feelings from 
their lowest depths. The mind must be profoundly stirred 
some way that the diapason of melody may be brought to its 
full height. Either the private man must undergo a series of 
conflicting shocks, or the times into which he is born must pre- 
sent the appearance of considerable demolition and reconstruc- 
tion. Milton lived through the convulsions of the Common- 
wealth; Chaucer fled to France after espousing the cause of 
Bolingbroke; Dante was exiled by the factions of Florence; 
Collins was driven mad by the collapsed state of his finances ; 
Petrarch was crazed by love ; Tasso both by love and fortune. 
The poets of the Augustan, Leonine, and Elizabethan epochs 
I place out of the account, as they lived through one of those 
moral earthquakes which bury religions and dynasties in their 
devastating career. Gray lived in a dull, stationary age, very 
quietly on his college foundation, in 'the dreary flats of Cam- 
bridgeshire ; but Gray, with the exception of two or three 
short pieces, is not entitled to preeminence, and cannot, there- 
fore, be called a great poet in the large sense of the term. The 
history of literature presents us with hardly a single instance of 
a first class poet in any eminent branch of his art, living through 
one of those stagnant levels which may be regarded as the 
wastes of intellectual existence, in comparative luxury and se- 
clusion, without a breath of change to ruffle his repose. 

It would, indeed, appear that all great poets have spent 
their lives in struggle and agitation, the outside world writing 
its experience on their hearts in characters of flame ; while the 



6o ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



inferior class have been more prone to rustic retirement, to the 
cultivation of the society of tulips rather than man, and to all 
the solitary blandishments of a country life rather than to the 
stormy contests of the world. Active life is the oxygen which 
supplies the flame upon which the subjective element feeds. 
Periodical contention, in the language of Young, not only 

Defecates the student's stagnant pool, 

but makes solitude more impressive. It is, in fact, the storm 
arising out of the efforts of a supple intellect to control or over- 
bear the impetuous torrent of adverse fate, which constitutes one 
of the chief phases of poetic greatness. Contrast Thomson 
sauntering in the gardens of the Countess of Dorset, snatching 
peaches with his lips, being too idle to reach them with his 
hand, or writing in bed, at noon, on the advantages of early 
rising, with Chaucer driven away from home and kindred by 
the storms of rival dynasties, or consuming his great heart in 
prison walls. Compare Shenstone in his garden, training his 
orchards or constructing his mimic waterfalls, with Tasso wan- 
dering over Italy with no rest for the sole of his foot till lodged 
in the mad-house of Ferrara, or with the vagrant Otway pining 
for bread, or with Collins shrieking his wild plaints round the 
walls of Chichester cathedral, or with Milton cuffing with his 
proud wing like an imperial eagle the storm which shattered 
his republic into the dust, and drove him into a garret. It 
would appear as if blighted affection, the sorrows of exile, some 
dangerous enterprise, or heart-tearing ordeals, were necessary 
ingredients to the full development of a poet's powers. The 
happiest efforts of Cowper's muse reflect his retiring disposition 
and the calm unruffled tenor of his daily life, just as the stormy 
career of Spenser and Milton has left its traces in the more 
vigorous and fiery emblazonments of their verse. Spenser's 
fancy delighted to paint daring feats of chivalry in enchanted 
forests, or in connection with the frowning battlements and 
terrific chambers of haunted castles ; while Milton, still more 






INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERISTICS. 61 

magnificently, employed his gorgeous imagination in contrasting 
the beautiful innocency of Eden with the dark abyss fitfully 
illumined with the baleful glare of fallen angels. During the 
composition of these fictions, Spenser resided in the midst of 
savage insurgents, with the nightly cries of rapine and murder 
resounding in his ears ; and Milton lived with the avenging 
sword of the State suspended by a hair over his head. A poet's 
works necessarily take the impress of the life which he leads, as 
his faculties are tutored by obstacles which interfere with the 
attainment of his wishes. In the inimitable grace • of Virgil's 
manner, and the harmonious flow of his versification, we catch 
the tones of one accustomed to the pomp and luxury of courts ; 
while the storm and pressure in the " Iliad " recall the blind old 
bard, whose life was a continual march through cities, which 
repudiated his existence while living, only to contend for him 
when dead. Pope and Dryden lived in daily contact with 
the most polished wits of the capital, through an age pregnant 
with dynastic change and political revolutions. There is, 
however, little hurricane in their verses, simply because there 
was none in their lives. Had either of these men drank as 
deeply of the cup of sorrow as Dante, had either like him been 
driven a houseless wanderer over the earth, it is probable that 
both would have left behind them some monument which would 
have equalled his in glory. 

Gray, doubtless, would have proved greater than he really is, 
had he not passed the prime of his existence in collegiate 
cloisters, without any reverses to stimulate his genius, alter- 
nately occupied between the use of the file and the employ- 
ment of his muse upon objects beneath his powers. For, when 
a poet has no experiences of his own, he is driven to imitation, 
by registering the experiences of others. Even the life of Burns, 
simple as it was brief, is crowded with bitter reverses, with 
passionate ecstatics of triumph, with blighting repulses, with 
broken hearts, with keenest anguish over departed loves, breaking 
in upon the mirth of convivial enjoyment. Had the poet not 



62 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

left his plough by the mountain-side for renewed intercourse with 
humanity, the joys and sorrows of domestic life, the raptures 
of successful, and the pangs of despised love, could never have 
been portrayed with such exquisite pathos, or refined sensibility. 
I very much question whether the two Wartons, who enjoyed 
more fame than their rustic contemporary, and who either had, 
or professed to have, the same keen appreciation for the 
beauties of nature, ever felt the glow of real passion in their 
hearts. Their lives were passed in scholastic retirement, 
without any event to discharge the electric shock of grief deep 
into their souls, and swell their hearts as with the uprising of 
an earthquake. Their poems are, therefore, tame and conven- 
tional, not natural plants, flowering the regions of sensibility in 
which everybody loves to roam, so much as sickly exotics, 
which cannot flourish out of the hot-house or the drawing- 
room. It is quite possible that a great mind in troublous times 
may sequester itself in solitude, deriving its objective nutri- 
ment from the effects of the moral whirlwind which is con- 
vulsing society beyond his sphere, and shattering the institution 
of centuries within an hour. But without feeling or witnessing 
grand images of terror or pity in others, or experiencing them 
himself, a poet is obliged to have recourse to second-hand 
sources for his emotions, to fill up the void in his own heart 
with the creations of others, which deprives his own of that 
originality so essential to their greatness. 

Another characteristic of great poets is the adoption of some 
field of thought, or of some region of spirituality peculiar to 
themselves. In one word, their strong individuality of con- 
ception stamps upon all their works those peculiar features 
which make them a distinct intellectual heritage for the human 
race. In Shakespeare we have all the variegated incidents of 
romantic life, combined with the general laws of humanity. 
There is no circumstance, however minute, in his dramas, but 
assumes a philosophic aspect. It is the union of the particular 
with the universal. His most trifling details arouse slumbering 



INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERISTICS. 63 

symphonies by touching the mainspring of the general cho r ds 
of the human breast. Spenser blends all the romance of chiv- 
alry with the Greek's refined conception of sensuous beauty; 
and Milton unites the latter element with the profound spirit of 
the Hebrew religion. Collins has invested classical forms with 
the ethereal mantle of spirituality. He has vitalized with the 
deepest feeling the old stock of poetic imagery, until its most 
obsolete redundancies strike the mind with the force of new 
conceptions. Burns opened out a new region by appealing, in 
an age of shams, to the common feelings which bind men in one 
brotherhood of humanity. Wordsworth took as his special field 
the unappropriated domain of the philosophical relationship 
between man and nature. Byron idealized passion, till all its 
sensuous traits, while preserving their original fire, were sub- 
merged in the spiritual feelings which love always awakens in lofty 
natures. Shelley made his imaginative mind the channel for elec- 
trifying the heart with the intellect and spirit of the Alexandrine 
philosophy. Keats transposed into poetry the sentient spirit 
of the same philosophy, which constructed a religion out of its 
passion for the beautiful. Thus, every great poet has his special 
mission. His peculiar idiosyncracies are so strongly marked, 
as to lead him to appropriate some distinct domain for the 
exercise of his genius. He, as it were, sets his mark upon it, 
and claims it for his heritage, without the admission of any 
copartnership whatever. By crossing hybrid systems, or by 
enduing ancient ideas with fresh juvenility, or by investing anti- 
quated beliefs with modern meaning and significance, they 
perpetually breed new thoughts, keep our nature in the glow 
of perpetual youth, neutralize the deadening influence of habit, 
and infuse new blood into the intellectual arteries of the world. 
We may, therefore, take it for granted that all great poets 
have either lived in times of startling change, or undergone 
great revolutions in their private fortunes. It may also be 
regarded as unquestionable that each has dominated his age, 
or soared above it, not in a political, but in a moral and 



64 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

gesthetic sense. It may, also, be held with the same degree of 
certainty, that every great poet has carved out for himself some 
distinct field of thought, or striking region of spirituality as his 
own peculiar province. Wherever these three great character- 
istics are found, there is lofty poetry. But where they are 
wanting, lofty poetry is not. 



ENGLISH SCHOOLS OF POETRY. 65 



CHAPTER V. 

ENGLISH SCHOOLS OF POETRY. 

POETRY may be viewed not less in relation to the faculties 
of the mind it calls into operation, or to the subjects 
selected for its display, than to the sources from which it is 
derived, and the manner or style of execution. It is with 
reference to the two last lights that the phases of this depart- 
ment of literature have become so marked as to give rise to 
distinct schools. 

The peculiar qualities of English poetry may be traced up to 
three distinct sources. The Oriental or Scriptural represents 
the attributes of the Deity, as they are manifested in His works. 
All the operations of nature are set down to the direct interven- 
tion of an overruling Providence, whose essence is reflected 
in the soul of man. Hence a kinship is established between 
God and humanity unknown to the literature of Rome and 
Greece. Man is withdrawn from the control of the senses, and 
taught to dive into the mysteries of his own heart. He is treated 
not simply as a moral agent, but as a child of the Father 
of the universe, and, as a son, learns to regard the Deity with 
reverence and filial affection. He looks upon heaven as his 
natural home, and the angels as his present helpmates and 
future companions. From this source arises that earnestness 
of purpose, that profound reflection and purity of feeling, which 
make the higher order of English poets stand out in advanta- 

5 



66 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

geous contrast to the heathen bards of antiquity. In Milton 
this spirit culminates in startling magnificence, without con- 
tracting the intellectual sphere, which it invariably does, in less 
gifted poets. The whole spirituality of man's nature is laid 
open to its profoundest depths. We fancy we hear the wheels 
of Jehovah's chariot thundering above our heads, or feel the 
sounds of his shouting quires of angels vibrate in our ears. The 
most impressive poetry of classical antiquity seems cold and un- 
impassioned, when contrasted with that arising out of the reve- 
lation of the hidden thoughts which connect man's destinies 
with the throne of the Eternal. But poetry of this nature, 
when unassociated with great breadth of intellect, and when 
exclusively directed to the cultivation of mere devotional 
feelings, is apt to fall into wearisome repetitions, stereotyped 
phraseology, and circumscribed views, which generally conspire 
to deprive the religious school of poetry of a high order of 
merit. It is only as the ally of the aesthetic element, as 
freighting the glad spirit of sensuous poetry with serious 
aims, as reinforcing the objective tendencies of the imagination 
with profound analytical soundings of the human heart, that 
the Oriental source has made its influence powerfully felt in 
our literature. 

The next source is that of the Greek or classical, which sup- 
plies the element Oriental poetry most lacks — that is, perfection 
of external form, and that spirit of sensuous beauty which the 
Hebrews so ruthlessly banished from their homesteads and 
temples. The body resumed its empire over the soul's concep- 
tions of the invisible world. The sense of voluptuousness, the 
power of the passions, the motive agents of the universe, were 
all invested with human forms of ethereal splendour, until the 
body became not the dead shell or transient receptacle of the 
soul, but the everlasting manifestation of spiritual activity. To 
nurture this spirit of physical beauty, until it actually scaled the 
sky, and peopled heaven with its creatures, the climate of 
Greece powerfully contributed. The clear translucent sky of 



ENGLISH SCHOOLS OF POETRY. 67 

the peninsula, its blue crystalline seas and glassy lakes, reflect- 
ing in their quiet depths all the hues of a variegated atmosphere 
— ever suffusing the earth with flushes of light as brilliant as the 
tints upon a ringdove's neck, — these, combined with its hill- 
tops, which seem to step out of the clouds and invite the gods 
down into the flowery nooks of its sinuous valleys, ever cur- 
tained with ilex and pine forests, — the influence of all these 
aggregate charms fostered, in the Greek, that gay and sunny 
spirit which made him regard the cultivation of his aesthetic 
nature as the chief end of existence. The perfection of form 
and distinctness of outline he found in the material types 
around him, he transferred to art. Hence, in poetry as in 
sculpture, unity of design, arising out of a proper consideration 
of parts, exact symmetry of proportion and exquisite finish of 
detail, combined with the harmonious coherence of the whole, 
became a necessity of his position. Every production had its 
nature, and must be regulated by its own specific laws. The 
plastic powers of the imagination were brought under the rule 
of an austere simplicity. Improprieties of detail, all minor 
ornaments which did not fit into the parts of a great structure, 
were discarded as incongruities. The region of poetry, by the 
Greeks, became in this way mapped out into distinct compart- 
ments ; and each of these was governed by its own code of 
formulisms. This makes Greek poetry more national than 
that of any other nation ; for, with the Greeks, poetry was not a 
mere plaything : it was the breath of their soul. In the epos 
and the ode, it animated the outer phases of their sensuou 
life : in the drama it embodied their religion. When the 
Greek liberties were destroyed, the genius which vitalized their 
poetry passed into philosophy. The triumphs of Pindar and 
yEschylus at Athens, were dimmed by the reverses of Plotinus 
at Alexandria. But, though the forms of Greek poetry have long 
since become practically dead, its spirit still survives in the 
sense of voluptuous beauty which characterizes the feminine 
creations of Spenser and Shakespeare, and the classical finish, 



68 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

the unity of design, and the matchless symmetry which Tasso 
and Milton were enabled to impart to their great epics. Its 
effects, however, are destined to be most felt in alliance 
with that philosophy supposed to have been its grave ; for 
Shelley and Keats have made that philosophy instinct with 
poetic life. While discarding the dead forms of Greek poetry, 
they have made its spirit animate with its youthful fires the 
philosophic element in which it subsequently became entombed, 
and rise like a phoenix from its ashes. 

In startling contrast with the Greek, is the Northern or 
Gothic source of poetry, which sprang out of the new manners 
engrafted by the Teuton hordes upon the decaying branches of 
the Roman Empire, and the .refining influence exercised by the 
Christian faith over their wild feelings and emotions. The 
conflicting elements of the new social structure impressed 
themselves upon the art-conceptions to which they gave birth. 
Lawless irregularity was substituted for the symmetrical develop- 
ment of Greek unity, and the more horrid embodiments of super- 
stition, for that magical perfection of form which moulded all 
the Greek conceptions of the supernatural world. Even the 
Hebrews avoided giving animated form to the powers of evil. 
Satan was with them a mere figure of speech. But the imagina- 
tion of the Gothic tribes peopled the air with demons, and 
threw out, into startling prominence, the Persian element of the 
Christian faith. The gloomy forests, the vast morasses, the wild 
and inclement regions in which the northern tribes encamped 
rather than found a home, filled their minds with images of 
terror. They started dragons in every cave, and encountered 
spirits in every wood. When the lightning was abroad, 
careering round the mountain peaks, they imagined monsters 
were spitting fire at them from the top of every cloud- 
capped cliff, which assumed, in the distance, the appearance 
of an enchanted castle. When these people broke in upon 
the Roman Empire, they infused their melancholy natures 
and gloomy superstitions and predatory habits into the races 



ENGLISH SCHOOLS OF POETRY. 69 

whom they conquered. From the blending of the bar- 
barous with the Christian element, and of both, with the de- 
caying embers of antique civilisation, arose that spirit of 
medieval chivalry, which, in its religious aspect, culminated in 
the frowning commedia of Dante, and, in its romantic aspect, 
in the wild and grotesque inventions of Ariosto. The trouba- 
dours and the courts of love were but the sentimental phase of 
that state of society which derived all its activity from tourna- 
ments and the crusaders. Romantic poetry constituted the 
very pulsation of medieval life. Its art, its religion, its practical 
business, its habits of reckless adventure, its knight-errantry, 
were only so many manifestations of the same spirit. Though 
most of the extravagancies of these ages have past away, they 
have left germs behind them, which have moulded, to no incon- 
siderable extent, the manners and institutions of the. present 
century. The spirit of individual freedom and heroic enter- 
prise, the chivalrous devotion to women, the purer moral 
feelings awakened by every phase of Christianity, the subjective 
tendencies of modern thought which have grown out of man's 
deeper communion with his own nature, — all these things have 
their roots in medieval times, and impart to the romantic 
poetry of our own day many of its characteristic features. 
Indeed, this class of poetry is but the stream or mirror in 
which the medieval age reflects its noblest aspects, and pre- 
serves its loftiest aspirations. It is the connecting link by 
which we trace back our lineage, which would otherwise appear 
to us mysterious and unknown. Though the region of cre- 
dulity is contracted, though the seer has long since descended 
from his eyrie, though nature now moves under the guidance 
of well-defined laws, the romantic poet still loves, on moun- 
tain and in forest, to commune with the creatures of his own 
imagination — to coerce beings from the frontiers of the in- 
visible world, that they may uplift the veil from futurity, or 
expound to him the mysteries of life and death. But these 
later manifestations of the Gothic school have not, like the Greek, 



70 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

any reference to popular mythology, or recognised philosophical 
system, but rather seek in strange elements of the supernatural, 
and daring combinations of design and adventure, new regions 
for the expansion of the intellect. 

These three sources of poetry, mixed with other elements 
arising out of the customs and fashions of different epochs, 
furnish the distinguishing features which separate groups of 
poets from each other, according to the manner and style of 
their execution. For the law of reaction is felt as widely in 
art, as elsewhere. When one style in poetry has been cultivated 
to excess, men get weary of its repetition. A new generation 
brings with it fresh habits of thought, or a new range of sym- 
pathies, and the old system is absorbed in the new birth. In 
England, these fluctuations have been controlled in a great 
measure by political events. The Troubadours, who were the 
first to clothe the spirit of chivalry in a poetic garb, left 
little impress either upon our manners or our language, both 
being in their time too rude to mirror the delicate conceptions 
of female gallantry ; though in later days our literature has 
amply made up for its shortcomings, in this respect, by a crowd 
of representatives, who allow an overweening devotion to 
women, to colour all their thoughts. The birth of English 
poetry, however, was tempered by more masculine elements, 
the tone of which it has preserved, to a greater or less extent, 
through the subsequent stages of its growth. It was not till 
Wickliffe had profoundly stirred the thought of the country, 
and a discrowned king set loose all those feelings which had 
looked up to the throne as the seat of divinity, that Chaucer 
arose to invest the incidents of every-day life with ideal beauty, 
and stamp the legends of his day with the impress of a natural 
imagination. Society, after maintaining for centuries something 
like a Chinese equilibrium, was beginning to move from its bases. 
He, therefore, dived into the recesses of his own nature, and 
painted everything, not according to the colours with which 
superstitious feelings or iron-handed custom had invested them, 



ENGLISH SCHOOLS OF POETRY. 71 

but according as they were imaged in the clear depths of his 
own mind. With Chaucer, then, may be said to have com- 
menced the natural school which, though frequently eclipsed 
by the vagaries of taste, has always revived in the crisis of great 
social convulsions. During the age of Elizabeth, everything was 
in a ferment. Thought was leavened with new ideas: men's 
minds agitated with great conceptions, found expression in 
language of the most natural character. Poets painted man 
as they found him, not the offspring of a complex system ol 
society, with artificial tastes and conventional sympathies ; but 
as a being endued with genuine feelings, and moving under the 
impulse of his own convictions. But these embodiments, 
under the iron rule of the Tudors, in order to be free, had to 
take a dramatic form, in which the natural simplicity of the 
characters became more transparent from being struck out of 
the poetic mint, without any foreign models to spoil, with 
sophisticated tints, the native force of the conception. By 
steeping their minds in bygone revolutions, the dramatists 
of the Elizabethan epoch escaped the blemishes of their age, 
and were enabled to reflect in their productions its freedom of 
thought unsullied by a taint of its religious ferocity. It was 
not until James for a while had extended his leaden sceptre 
over us, that poetry strayed from the pure regions of nature to 
become scholastic. The foible of the day was verbal disputa- 
tion and the subtilties of the school divinity. The muse lost 
herself in a maze of pedantic conceits. It is singular that 
when physics were first beginning to cast off the quibbling 
entities of the cloister, the muse should have donned the dis- 
carded drapery. But such were her courtly propensities during 
the reign of the earlier Stuarts, that she arrayed herself in 
scholastic conceits, quite as eagerly as the fine gentleman of the 
period took to lace and ruffles. We find the fashion more or 
less predominant in every poet of the epoch, to a rampant 
degree in Donne and Cowley, in a mitigated form in Waller, 
Herrick, and Herbert. There were, however, authors who 



72 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

strove to give this bent its natural direction, the efforts of whose 
muse may be said to have resulted in the birth of the didactic 
poem. When Sir John Davies wrote his piece on the immor- 
tality of the soul, Drayton his " Polyolbion," and Denham his 
" Cooper Hill," they were each, in a different style, uncon- 
sciously laying the foundation of a new department of their 
art. Johnson has designated all these writers as metaphysical, 
an unpardonable application of a term frequently condemned 
for want of meaning. It would be juster to call the former the 
scholastic, the latter the philosophic school of poets. But the 
scholastic was only a passing form reflecting the corrupt taste 
of an ephemeral epoch. The latter, so far as it allied philosophy 
with nature, is destined to remain an enduring monument. 

The scholastic poets, with all their pedantry, had still a dash 
of natural imagery at the bottom of their conceptions. They, 
however, prepared the way, if they did not half advance the 
nation on the road to a state of things in which unsophisticated 
nature was destined to disappear altogether. Up to the end of 
the Commonwealth, the national muse owed no obligations to 
any foreign source but the Italian, and in a very secondary 
degree to the Spanish ; and these were limited to the plots our 
dramatists used to steal from Calderon, and to Spenser's imita- 
tions of Tasso, and the quaint conceits the scholastic poets 
pilfered from Marini. But the star of French dominion was 
rising, and with it the influence of her literature. While the 
Puritan government assisted the one, it sedulously erected a 
bulwark against the incursions of the other. 

At the Restoration the change was felt in rhyming tragedies 
and the substitution of spasmodic for genuine sentiment. The 
muses debauched at Court no longer selected for their themes 
natural objects, but the refined manners of polished society. 
Instead of artless nymphs reclining with dishevelled locks by 
the founts of Helicon, they stepped out of the drawing-room, 
like conventional belles, glittering with conceits, and bristling 
with epigram. Bold strokes of invention were abandoned for 



ENGLISH SCHOOLS OF POETRY. 73 

mere elegance of language ; sublimity of description for lively- 
sallies of wit ; genuine pathos for refined sentiment ; spiritual 
analogies of fancy and passionate bursts of imagination for 
stereotyped figures of speech and elegant antitheses. Man was 
considered not in relation to the universe of which he is the 
crowning feature, but as a being whose destinies are pent up 
within the narrow range of civic life. The picture of humanity 
was set, not in a magnificent framework of glen, pine forest, and 
mountain interfused with heaven-reflecting lake and ship- 
freighted ocean, but cooped up within a far more confined arena, 
of which the mall, the park, and the exchange constituted the 
foreground. Love became coquettishness ; passion, rant ; and 
genuine feeling, conventional sympathy. So deeply did the 
change affect the taste of the period, that the plays of the 
Elizabethan dramatists could not be endured, and the poems 
of Chaucer, Spenser, as subsequently those of Milton, were 
allowed to sleep in oblivion. Even Shakespeare had to be 
re-written to suit the coarse palate of the epoch. It would 
appear as if the debauched manners of the Stuarts and the 
slavish political maxims which their restoration revived, by 
destroying the germ of free thought, had brought the mind of 
the nation to the last stage of decrepitude. Genius may with- 
stand social corruption, while politically free, and even political 
thraldom, if manners are undebauched by coarse sensualities. 
But it never yet has been found to survive the corrosive influence 
of these conjoint forces for two generations together. 

This, which I would call the material, is usually denominated 
the French school of poetry ; I do not know from what cause, 
unless it be from the feeling that nothing but what is good can 
spring from ourselves, and that, if there be any evil, it must 
be imported from our neighbours. But the fact is, there 
are two elements in it, the worst of which undoubtedly 
sprung from that reaction against Puritanism which drove 
the nation into depraved courses, as a natural protest against 
the whining austerities by which it had been oppressed. 



74 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

The other element is the conventional, which we may ascribe 
to the French without wounding their too delicate suscepti- 
bilities; for, it left legitimate effects permanently behind it, long 
after the slavish maxims of the Stuarts, and the influence of 
the Puritan reaction, had passed away. Our Gallic neighbours 
have always been haunted with the idea that they are the 
Greeks of the modern world, born to keep alive among man- 
kind that passion for beauty of form and symmetrical design 
they inherit from antiquity. Hence, their predilection for 
Greek subjects in tragedy, and for the forms of the classic 
drama. The heroic couplet which they falsely led us to adopt 
in the theatre, when rhyming tragedies went out with the old 
government, was employed to a much wider extent than ever, 
as the vehicle of all subjects of an extensive character. It 
was also the aim of the French school to make up, for the lack 
of romance in their subjects, by polish and superior finish in the 
execution of their poems. This aim after perfection of style 
remained, when the muse once more reverted for topics to the 
storehouse of creation. These two features, viz. the employ- 
ment of the heroic couplet and elaborate finish, with a due 
regard to the unities, constitute the principal features of the 
classic school, which sprang up after the settlement of our 
national liberties had imparted a bolder tone of thought to the 
muse of the country. Milton had himself furnished a splendid 
example of classical unity and symmetry of proportion, while 
the an ti- Puritan reaction was at its height ; but his merit was 
not acknowledged till that reaction expired under the new 
regime, when his works, doubtless, contributed to restore the 
national muse to the breezy lawns of the country, though 
shackled by such rules of art as spring from an adhesion to 
classic models. In Gray and Collins, French elegance of 
expression and classical correctness were combined with as 
much sublimity of imagination and genuine pathos as the lyric 
and elegiac forms admit of. Nature, however, had previously 
gained her ascendency in Thomson, who may be regarded as 



ENGLISH SCHOOLS OF POETRY. 75 

the bold reviver of the natural school of poetry, after nearly 
every trace of it had been obliterated by the tide of French 
innovation. Henceforward the two schools, each claiming for 
itself the same wide range of objects, were destined to act 
and react upon each other. In the first part of the eighteenth 
century the classical school ruled supreme. In the middle and 
latter part of the eighteenth century, the natural vindicated for 
itself a large share of the public esteem. But the ascendency 
in point of popularity was with the classical. In Thomson, 
Cowper, and Burns, the natural culminated; in Dodsley it 
found its feeblest expositor. Goldsmith, Churchill, and Crabbe 
were the best cultivators of the classical school ; Darwin and 
Hailey the worst. 

The material school is closely allied with the classical, as the 
romantic with the natural. The philosophical is equally seen in 
conjunction with both. Davies is an example of the one, 
Akenside of the other. In Pope, the Gallico-classical school 
triumphed ; in Milton, the Oriento-classical ; in Shakespeare, the 
natural ; in Spenser, the romantic. The natural school, depending 
more on the use of the Teutonic, than the Greek element in our 
language, ought, in combination with the romantic, to constitute 
our leading school of poetry. It is the only school in accordance 
with our national characteristics, our primitive traditions, and our 
historical associations. In the drama, it has generally been in 
the ascendant, unless during the fitful period of the Restora- 
tion, when the material school took the stage by storm. In 
other departments of poetry, down to the seventeenth century, 
the natural school stood without a rival. But during the last 
two centuries, its reign has been only intermittent. In the 
century which followed the Restoration, it lay, comparatively 
speaking, dead. But the natural school has awoke since with 
something of its pristine strength, and has at length managed 
to win back for itself a large portion of the public favour. 

Schlegel divides the schools of poetry into the classical and 
romantic, taking the latter in a sense peculiar to himself, as the 



76 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

school in which the spirit of Christian love predominates. 
Those poems which represent their heroes emerging from the 
conflict with evil, purified by the struggle, and raised, as it 
were, to a higher existence, as the " Prometheus " of Shelley, are 
romantic. Those, on the other hand, which represent their 
heroes succumbing in the strife, and descending into the gulf 
of darkness, with the precipitation of an Orestes, Macbeth, or 
a Faust, these are pre-eminently classical. Schlegel appears to 
have been led into this inversion of the ordinary meaning of 
these terms, by his theological prepossessions. Classical poetry 
sprung out of a state of society in which Christianity was not ; 
it is, therefore, ethnic in scope and purpose. Romantic 
poetry sprung out of a state of society in which Christianity 
was the principal element : it is, therefore, evidently moral in 
its aim and conception. 

Romantic poetry, however, has nothing to do with Christianity 
as a system, but only with the more variegated hues which it 
derived from Persian sources, and the fusion of Oriental with 
Gothic ideas which it threw into the heart of Europe. Hence, 
romantic poems are formed upon no regular models, but reflect 
in their features the bizarre and confused elements from which 
they spring. Classical poetry may be said to deify nature, 
romantic to embody spirit. The one divinizes the human, the 
other humanizes the divine. The one subordinates the spiritual 
to the material, the other the material to the spiritual element. 
Occasionally, however, there is a disparity between the subject 
selected and the manner of handling it. Blackmore chose a 
romantic subject, but his treatment of it was eminently 
classical. In the hands of Ariosto, classical subjects assume a 
romantic aspect ; in the hands of Tasso, chivalrous and romantic 
subjects, a classical aspect. In our own Spenser, both 
romantic subject and the romantic treatment of it are eminently 
united. Goethe is romantic in " Faust " and " Goetz Berlichingen," 
but classical in " Tasso" and " Herman and Dorothea." Schiller 
is romantic in the "Robbers," but classical in his "Iphigeneia of 



ENGLISH SCHOOLS OF POETRY, 77 

Tauris." But our dramatists, except in Court masques, are 
seldom classical, while the French are always so. Shakespeare 
is romantic in his " Midsummer Night's Dream/' and Marlowe 
in " Faust." These authors, however, reverted to the natural 
style in " Julius Caesar " and "Edward II." But, when the 
Elizabethan age expired, all taste for romantic poetry expired 
along with it. The spirit slept for three centuries, only to 
revive in the last age with keener force, and under new forms 
of existence. 

The revolt of Gothic art against classical models, from 
which, in early times, romanticism sprung, was destined later 
to blend the term with the spirit of revolt, manifested in poetic 
conceptions, against existing institutions and all established 
authorities whatever. Modern romanticism, thus, became a 
sort of protest against medieval romanticism. The term both 
in Germany and Italy became identified, as regards all forms 
of art, with the most unfettered exercise of individual freedom. 
Christianity, which had largely impregnated the old romanticism 
with its visions of a posthumous world, was fated to be driven 
from its sphere by the new romanticism, which hungered after 
fresh theories of existence. The old sources of the supernatural 
were exhausted. The machinery seemed worn out. Men craved 
for something new. Hence, " Faust " and " Manfred " became 
the exponents of a school, which left the soul to construct out 
of the ruins of the past, by its own unaided intuitions, a new 
scheme of the supernatural entirely subversive of the modern 
framework of society. In despotic countries, the war against 
existing faiths and established modes of government, could only 
be carried on by an onslaught upon the literary outworks in 
which those forms of faith and government found expression. 
In this manner, the romanticism of the poet became not unfre- 
quently a cloak for the disguise of the revolutionist. The new 
romanticism thus assumed a form in direct conflict with its 
former principles. The old romanticism was credulous, sub- 
missive, and devout. The new is sceptical, rebellious, and 



78 EST IMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

profane. The modern offshoot has nothing in common with 
its parent except irregularity of lineaments and unproportional 
forms, while the animating spirit within is one of startling 
paradox, of withering satire, and of an unbridled license sub- 
versive of all authority. The old romanticism was lifted into 
the ascendant by the quiet revolution of events. The new 
romanticism seeks to enthrone itself by force and violence. 

In the nineteenth century the old schools have been much 
broken up, or found in connection with new combinations. In 
Wordsworth, the natural school has been combined with the 
philosophic ; in Southey, with the romantic element. Crabbe 
has identified realistic subjects with classical, Browning with 
natural and romantic treatment. Swinburne has divorced the 
material, from the conventional, school, and allied it with the 
natural. In Montgomery, classical treatment is combined with 
the religious element. In Longfellow, the natural is suffused 
with a tinge of the romantic. The poets of the nineteenth cen- 
tury have been as much distinguished by an eclecticism with regard 
to their styles, as its builders with regard to their architecture, 
or its philosophers with regard to their philosophy. Some of 
the leading poets have a peculiar style of their own, while those 
of the inferior classes have sought distinction by adopting a 
melange so striking as to confound most of the schools which 
have preceded them. It is the peculiar weakness of the thought 
of the age not to know what it would be at, to set aesthetic and 
logical coherence at defiance, to override radical principles, and 
to imagine it has arrived at a satisfactory solution of conflicting 
views by blending their contrarieties into one system. Nowhere 
have these tendencies been so conspicuously displayed as in the 
poetic arena. It has, therefore, been, in some degree, necessary 
to group those poets, who depart from, or blend in their treat- 
ment, the old established divisions, by some leading feature, 
which their works have in common. In Tennyson and his 
imitators, who are chiefly of the feminine class, the principles 
of design largely predominate over those of nature. They may, 



ENGLISH SCHOOLS OF POETRY. 79 

therefore, be correctly designated the art school. Montgo- 
mery and Longfellow are, in common, distinguished for the 
prominence they give to social life and the domestic affections. 
They, therefore, form a group apart. Shelley and Keats are 
equally distinguished for their poetic rendering of the old philo- 
sophy. They, therefore, fall into the same category. Swinburne 
more nearly approaches them than any other group. There is, 
however, this difference, that they devote themselves to the 
spiritual side of Greek pantheism, while Swinburne almost 
exclusively worships its material and sensuous aspects. No 
poets could be more dissimilar than Crabbe and Browning, but 
they are at one in discarding the fictitious element in poetry, and 
in confining themselves to the production of the actual. They, 
therefore, keep each other company. In the case of those 
writers who have, like Scott and Byron, treated their subjects 
conformably to the source from which they are derived, I have 
adopted the old classification, as it does not interfere with the 
division according to some distinguishing feature in their 
works. Poets, after all, are a very difficult class of people to 
place in order, and if Plato banished them from his "Republic," 
it might have been not so much on the ground of immorality, 
as out of resentment at their setting anything like philosophical 
arrangement at defiance. 

But one of the strangest combinations of the century is the 
alliance of much of the turgid rant and inflated epithets which 
distinguished the dramatists of the Restoration, with the hybrid 
mixture of philosophy and religion which distinguishes the poets 
of our own age. The wild and unbridled use of the fancy has 
been, heretofore, accompanied with a similar licence in moral- 
ity. But we have a bevy of poets who, in the rage for novelty, 
have allied quiet, staid topics of religious, and domestic senti- 
mentality with a license of rant and bombast which is hardly 
paralleled by anything in Nathaniel Lee or Colley Cibber. 
Ambiguity and unmeaningness very much interfere with the 
merits of this class of writers, who endeavour to make up for 



80 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

profound thought and intellectual unity in their works, by strong 
flashes of fancy and inflated forms of expression. It cannot 
be denied, however, that their poems contain many beauties, 
though these are not of such a class as to prevent the name 
of " spasmodic school" from being fairly applied' to them. 

Another class are those who, while living in town, affect a 
great love for the country — who are supposed to explode into 
raptures at the sight of a hedge of honeysuckle or a field of 
turnips. With these gentlemen, Pope and all the classical 
school of poets are at a sad discount. Hence Byron called 
them derisively the Cockney school of poets. Their taste, 
however, is good for what it accepts, and is only bad for what 
it repudiates. The question whether objects of wit are admis- 
sible themes for poetry has long since been decided against 
them. In the Bowles' controversy, Byron showed that a great 
poet might be a poor critic; but the discussion he started 
enabled Campbell to prevent the domain of English poetry 
from being narrowed by sectarian views, and to place its 
principles upon a catholic foundation. 



THE LAKE SCHOOL. 81 



CHAPTER VI. 

GENERAL FEATURES OF THE LAKE SCHOOL. 

THE eighteenth century went out amid the throes of social 
and political revolutions. America had gained her inde- 
pendence. France, after regenerating herself, was employed 
:-;pon the singular mission of regenerating Europe. Everywhere, 
the rights of man were receiving a practical illustration, either 
from the pen of the theorist, the sword of the warrior, or the 
axe of the public executioner. All human institutions were 
shaken to their foundations. In political discussions, men 
ignored, if they did not repudiate, all past authority. The old 
system of society was crumbling into ruin, and there was a loud 
demand for new institutions, with broader and deeper founda- 
tions than those in which its medieval convictions had reposed. 
Poetry, among other things, experienced the levelling tendencies 
of the epoch. As the old rule of kings and priests, the pompous 
ceremonies of state, the gilded trappings of power were pushed 
aside as in conflict with the wants of an enlightened people, so in 
poetry, the tinsel decorations of Greek art, the purple robe and 
the nodding plume, with the whole storehouse of tropes, allego- 
ries, and personifications, were discarded for the expression of 
the genuine feelings of the heart and the affectionate sympathies 
of nature, which the stately trappings of the muse were sup- 
posed to impair, if not to extinguish. Society was recalled by the 
same ardent band of enthusiasts to its original laws, and poetry 
resolved into its primitive elements as they existed in the 

6 



82 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

human heart. Parnassus was to be purified from the false 
idols, and political government from the unjust principles, 
which tyranny or a perverted taste had introduced into their 
respective domains. Nor can it be denied that the one needed 
as much the pruning-knife of the reformer as the other. The 
French classical school, after culminating in Pope, and passing 
through various stages of senility in the works of Parnel and 
Blackmore, had reached its last gasp in the pages of Pye and 
Darwin. The Laureate's chair had been occupied by a succes- 
sion of writers, whom to call poets in any sense of the term, 
would be a singular inversion of all that we understand by that 
name. Burns was left to pine in obscurity as a custom-house 
informer; Cowper, though more in the ascendant, was com- 
pletely overshadowed by the imperial fame of Macpherson. 
The public mind not only required to be brought back to the 
plain masculine simplicity of the Elizabethan age, but to have 
its sympathies awakened for a new species of poetic excellence 
radically opposed to the expiring school which had absorbed 
all its' appreciation. 

The men who deemed themselves competent to undertake 
this task, were possessed of slender pecuniary, but large intel- 
lectual resources, — of scrupulous rectitude, of unstable political 
convictions, but of the most unflinching attachment to letters. 
Southey, Coleridge, and Lovell, the originators of the move- 
ment, in addition to the bond of congenial tastes and convic- 
tions, had married three sisters from Bristol, one a school- 
mistress, the other an actress, and the third a milliner, without 
any certain prospect in either case of providing for the pressing 
exigencies of wedded life. The result was a violent conflict 
with existing institutions, which they regarded as the cause of 
their own hardships ; and a keen sympathy for the classes 
below them, whom a still severer fate had condemned to 
misery and disgrace. These writers subsequently fell in with 
Wordsworth, whose private means were as slender, and whose 
political sympathies were as ardent, as their own. Similarity of 



THE LAKE SCHOOL. 83 

tastes and feelings led to a warm friendship. This literary 
union, which began in Somerset, was further strengthened by 
the production of literary works in common. Southey and 
Coleridge wrote and published in Bristol, conjointly, a drama 
entitled " The Fall of Robespierre," a mushroom production 
which sprang up in a single night. In the same town, Words- 
worth published, in conjunction with Coleridge, the " Lyrical 
Ballads," a work which nobody would buy, and the failure ot 
which, each was amiable enough to attribute to his partner's 
wares, selecting those for censure which are indisputably the 
best parts of the work. To the " Lyrical Ballads " were pre- 
fixed elaborate prefaces by Wordsworth, explanatory of the new 
school of poetry, which the reviewers treated with derision. 
But these poets were alike undismayed by obloquy, and proof 
against neglect. Their love of nature being as unconquerable 
as their passion for letters, they abandoned Somerset, the scene 
of their early failures, and sought out an abiding home among 
the mountains of Cumberland. Hence, they obtained the 
name of the Lake School, an appellation which marks out 
similarity of tastes and convictions, as well as familiar re- 
lationship, rather than any common principles of poetic doc- 
trines exemplified in their works. 

There were, however, certain broad features which they agreed 
to recognize as constituting the essential elements of poetry. 
Nor were they inclined to show much mercy to any who chose 
to wander beyond the landmarks they had laid down. They 
pushed their antipathy to the French classical school of poetry 
to so great an extent as to exclude Pope and Dryden from the 
category of poets altogether. Subjects, or illustrations drawn 
from art, were, in their view, far inferior to those drawn from 
nature. They were united in the belief that the natural school, as 
illustrated by Chaucer and the Elizabethan poets, was the only 
genuine school of poetry which this country possesses, or of which 
it ought to be proud. They were also united in asserting that 
no poetry can be good, even in an aesthetic sense, which is 



84 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

divorced from the moral principle, on the ground, I suppose, 
that no real pleasure, which it is the object of poetry to realize, 
can be conveyed by depicting the coarser passions, or by any 
representation which subjects the more delicate susceptibilities 
of man's nature to the domination of his animal propensities. 
The Lake poets placed the proper functions of poetry in illus- 
trating the charities of human life, and humbling the pride ot 
the intellect at the shrine of the affections, rather than in the 
delineation of overmastering energy, or in illustrating that 
Titanic force which conquers fate by indomitable will. 

Of the blunter joys and passions of human life, they seem to 
have known nothing. Instead of plunging into the business 
of the world, and draining to the lees its pleasures and its 
sorrows, they held themselves aloof, cultivating the domestic 
virtues in seclusion, without any knowledge of social phenomena 
except through the casual reports of visitors, or the pale reflex 
of newspapers. Hence, as poets, they laboured under a 
double disadvantage. Excluded from the sphere of passion, 
they could only feel at home in reflective themes, in illustrating 
the domestic virtues, or in moralizing upon the vicissitudes of 
life, or in deriving from the appearances of nature lessons of 
wisdom, and materials for the display of their imaginative 
powers. Their knowledge of human affairs became propor- 
tionally contracted, as they were shut out from the world of 
practical experience. When, therefore, in their verse they ven- 
tured upon philosophical speculation, they were at the mercy 
of abstract theories, arising out of a very imperfect acquaint- 
ance with the facts to which those theories applied. They 
were, in reality, incompetent to deal with the world of passion ; 
and, in the sphere of reflection, narrow prejudices interfered 
to deprive their loftiest thoughts of the value they would 
otherwise have possessed. The sincerity of the Lake poets, 
in abandoning opinions much in advance of their age, for 
others of an equally retrogressive tendency, has been often 
called in question. But the French Revolution, beginning 



THE LAKE SCHOOL. 85 

with bright omens for the happiness of the human family, 
only to have its fair dawn overshadowed by storms of 
violence and bloodshed, may palliate, if it does not entirely 
account for, the revulsion of political feeling which marked 
the outset of their career. It is, however, to be regretted 
that the change from the extreme of Republicanism to the 
extreme of Toryism, was made at the time when then- 
private fortunes were undergoing considerable renovation. 
When a man betters his condition by changing his opinions, 
some doubt generally arises as to the purity of his motives, 
especially when his new opinions can claim few solid reasons 
in their favour. Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, without 
a sixpence, advocating Radical institutions, and Southey lau- 
reate, Wordsworth distributor of stamps, Coleridge secretary 
to the Governor of Malta, advocating the most ultra doctrines 
in Church and State of the old Tory school, cannot be said to 
afford no ground for suspicion. But all extreme opinions are 
only too liable to generate their opposites in fervid minds, who 
are in nowise apt to base their convictions upon the reasoning 
principle. And it seems quite natural that, as the first set of 
opinions were maintained with all the rashness of zeal, the 
other should have been upheld with all the fervour of in- 
tolerance. But the question of sincerity, however much it 
may touch their characters as men, can have little bearing upon 
their position as poets. Pope, in the controversy upon his 
poetic merits, was trounced for his peccadilloes with Martha 
Blount, and his inconstancy to Stewart Wortley, — just as if one 
sin the more, or one virtue the less, could possibly affect his 
place in the ranks of Parnassus. Had the opinions of the 
Lake poets been taken up merely out of selfish interest to serve 
a party, they hardly would have made them the staple material 
of works intended for posterity. But these gentlemen are in 
the unfortunate position, that their candour cannot be defended 
except at the cost of their intellect. As they introduced these 
opinions in their poems, the philosophical narrowness or 



86 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

unsoundness of such opinions, becomes an element in the 
appreciation of their productions as works of art. That such 
opinions excluded them from a catholic sympathy with the 
human race, that they interposed human formulas of belief 
which overshadowed to them the spiritual phenomena of the 
universe, that they introduced conflicting elements in their 
views, that they narrowed the poetical boundaries of their 
conceptions, that they caused them to link the domestic sym- 
pathies with a hybrid philosophy, and to sacrifice to prejudice 
those talents which ought to have been employed in unriveting 
its fetters, — all these, and much more, hindered them from 
attaining that lofty eminence in their art which they vainly 
imagined would be conceded to them by posterity. 



THE LAKE POETS. 87 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE LAKE POETS. 

IT may serve to bring out a salient point of distinction be- 
tween Wordsworth and those of his predecessors in the 
natural school, to observe that, while their poles of thought are 
objective, his is mostly subjective. Cowper and Thomson mostly 
select for description those objects which strike the spectator 
with natural beauty or grandeur, and which enable them to pro- 
duce corresponding impressions in the minds of their readers. 
Wordsworth, on the other hand, selects such as are mean and 
trivial, in order that the attractiveness of his pictures may be 
entirely owing to the ideal atmosphere with which he has in- 
vested them. His manner of transforming a withered thorn, a 
miry pool, or leafless oak into objects of profound interest, shows 
how little his creations owe to the external subject, and how 
much to the gorgeous colouring of his own mind. If his fancy 
sports with flowers, it is not the frail beauties of the garden, 
but the daisy and celandine that are the objects of his adora- 
tion. The meanest product of nature has links which connect 
it with the infinite. It is in revealing these links that his 
imagination imparts the charm of novelty to the most familiar 
scenes. To him, 

The bare trees, the mountains bare, 
The grass in the green fields, 



88 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

impart a sense of joy, as if their principle of life beat in mys- 
terious sympathy with that of his own nature. As the meanest 
objects are invested with wonder, so the most material become 
instinct with spirit and intelligence. A bald stone upon an emi- 
nence seems to him a huge sea-beast crawled forth to sun itself. 
A tall rock piercing the clouds wears on its crest the appearance 
of an imperial castle which ruin cannot touch. Wordsworth's 
mind expands with the greatness of his subject, until the loftiest 
derive fresh grandeur from its majesty or depth. Skiddaw, 
clothed with his thoughts, strikes us with greater force than when 
surveyed in its naked reality; and Helvellyn acquires a grandeur 
from his conceptions which it fails to derive even from the 
magnifying influences of cloud and tempest. Even the moral 
feelings of the poet become identified with the scenes he 
describes. The flower shrinks from the gaze with the shyness 
of his nature, the cliff lifts its head with the uprightness of 
his spirit, and the lake imbibes from his purity a crystalline 
clearness which is not its own. 

Had Wordsworth displayed the same comprehensiveness in 
dealing with man as with nature, his genius would not have 
been so long ignored. But in the human sphere, he was ham- 
pered by theories which cut him off from genuine sympathy 
with the largest section of humanity. Mont Blanc and Lake 
Leman he could appreciate as much as any man ; but foreign 
manners or institutions he could never understand. Even 
in his own country, his sympathies were bound up with a 
trifling fragment of the population. Wordsworth, though 
a Tory, turned his back upon the great conservative classes of 
society, as unworthy of his attention. His heart only beat in 
unison with the rustic poor, with the poor who had no radical 
leanings, with the poor who regarded the village parson as a sort 
of tutelary divinity in this lower world. What are called respect- 
able people, Wordsworth scrupulously avoids. He is only at 
home when he falls in with a vagrant pedlar, an idiot boy, or a 
ragged shepherd. With a perfumed haunter of clubs, or, indeed, 



THE LAKE POETS. 89 

with any gloved person, he will hold no converse whatever. The 
upper ten thousand were to Wordsworth poetically worthless ; 
for he imagined that the feelings of the heart were never found 
in their maturity except in the huts of hinds and society of 
peasants. There was, however, some object in this exclusive- 
ness. It would appear that Wordsworth designed, by the 
instrumentality of the lowest ranks of society, to erect a poetic 
temple, at the shrine of which the most selfish hearts should be 
humanized, and a feeling of love kept alive, reciprocating and 
reciprocated, between the rich and the poor, the politically 
great and the socially defenceless, for ever. 

Life is the vital energy of love j 

and as long as the two extremes of society stood looking at each 
other with feelings of repulsion, the end of existence could not 
be realised. His verse was to become the medium of identifying 
the loftiest purposes of his art with the purest aims of Christianity. 
His theory of the poetic art seems to have fitted in to this view. 
No language could be poetical which was factitious or conven- 
tional. The muse must wear a russet robe, and speak in the 
plainest style. Her vocabulary must be that of which lettered 
halls and academies take no account. No other language 
but that used by vagrants and peasants could express the 
genuine sentiments of the heart. The lower, therefore, you de- 
scend in the social scale, the fitter subjects you find for poetry. 
His hatred to the Pope school, doubtless, contributed largely 
to this result. He appears to have taken the Queen Anne 
poets as embodying every feature which he ought most studi- 
ously to avoid. Their civic life he repudiates for the society of 
pedlars ; their drawing-room conventionalities, for the manners 
of the farm and the cottage ; their turgid epithets, for the lan- 
guage of simplicity ; their phosphorescent display of sparkling 
wit, for the domination of the affections and the human charities ; 
their lavish delineation of external objects, for the inner laws of 
the spiritual universe, and the deep soundings of the infinite 



90 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

mind. Hence he sweeps away with boundless contempt the 
decorative pomp of verse, all the jargon of mythological allusion, 
all the machinery of tropes and figures, as things which had 
defiled the sacred temple of poetry, in whose aisles nothing 
should be heard but the pure voice of the human heart, 
recording its own joys and sorrows, or communing with the 
mysteries of the universe. But man in the upper classes is the 
creature of conventions. It is only in the lower, that he moves 
under the spontaneous influence of his feelings, or obeys the 
voice of nature. He, therefore, felt himself restricted to 
select his heroes from the humblest types of humanity. But 
vagrants and pedlars belong to a low walk of art, and assum- 
ing that Wordsworth surrounds these subjects with all the 
atmosphere of poetic inspiration, this would not by any means 
lift him to the loftiest rank in poetry. The Eve of Milton, the 
Una of Spenser, or the Haidee of Byron, belongs to a far 
higher school of poetic creation than Ellen, Ruth, or Martha 
Ray, just as the Venus of Titian is a far higher creation of 
genius than any dairy-maid in the farmsteads of Moreland, 
or any Flemish weaver's mistress in the rustic revels of Teniers. 
The exclusiveness of Wordsworth's theory is founded on the 
limitations of his own powers. He was incompetent to repro- 
duce human nature in the broad phase of sensuous joyousness, 
in any class. He, therefore, held it wrong to divorce poetry 
from the ethical principle. But the higher products of civiliza- 
tion, the refined and aesthetic, who have hearts beating beneath 
their bosoms even more sensitive than those of any drunken 
waggoner or distressed sempstress, — these, he declared, could 
afford us few instances of genuine feeling, because he was unable 
to describe the workings of the affections in combination with 
refined manners, or delicate breeding. The sensuous phases or 
the lofty turbulence of passion in any grade of society he could 
not describe at all, or, at least, if he could, he never attempted it. 
Wordsworth's exclusion from the tempestuous regions of the 
soul confines him to the reflective element. He is a philo- 



THE LAKE POETS. 91 

sophical poet, or he is nothing. Even his smallest pieces are 
written to illustrate some mental phenomenon, or to unveil 
some striking analogy between the natural and the moral world. 
His great poem, " The Excursion," was designed to propound 
his views on man, nature, and society. But what those views were, 
he never condescends to tell us, in any of his numerous prefaces, 
but leaves us to pick them up as well as we can from his 
poems. He does, however, inform us that the " Prelude," 
which contains a history of the growth of his own powers, may 
be considered as an ante-chapel to his great Gothic cathedral, 
" The Excursion," and all his shorter pieces little shrines or 
recesses which fit into the same grand structure. But this 
merely suggests systematic unity of design, without throwing any 
light upon its purpose. Now this grand unity of design can be 
nowhere traced in its works. There are certain isolated principles 
scattered up and down his pages, but no attempt to concatenate 
these principles, so as to mark out their mutual relationship, or 
to form them into a grand system of philosophic truth. The 
absence of such a pervading unity, with the conflicting principles 
it embodies, is the great blemish of " The Excursion." 

This poem purports to treat of man in his multiform rela- 
tions to nature and society. As such, the subject-matter was 
not different from that which Pope had already handled a cen- 
tury before. The only two philosophical poems of first class 
merit which had come down to the nineteenth century were the 
great poem of " Lucretius," and Pope's celebrated essay. Both 
were characterised by admirable unity of sentiment, precision 
of reasoning, and accuracy of thought. The parts are skilfully 
dovetailed into each other, blending multiform variety of design 
with classical unity of purpose. But there is an entire absence 
of these features in " The Excursion." Instead of unity there is 
dissonance; for precision there is vagueness; for accuracy, confu- 
sion of thought. It cannot be stated that Wordsworth's theme 
was too general for minute philosophical discrimination. The sub- 
ject-matter the poet proposes to treat of, is the very same Pope 



92 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

laid out for himself in the "Essay on Man." Wordsworth 
embodies his views far more poetically than his predecessor, in 
a fictitious narrative ; whereas Pope abandoned the concrete 
form, for abstract principles. But the opposite manner of treat- 
ment does not constitute the difference. The fact is, Pope 
thought out his subject before committing it to verse; while 
Wordsworth never manipulated his ideas with a view to secure 
coherency of design, but went on sounding his way, guided by 
two conflicting charts, which led him through all the mazes of 
inconsistency. 

If there is one feature more predominant than another in 
Wordsworth's poetry, it is the feeling of a silent interchange of 
sympathy between man and the various forms of inanimate 
nature. For him, 

The meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 

It seems a fundamental belief with Wordsworth, that every 
phase of inorganic existence is endued with certain spiritual 
properties corresponding to its rank in creation, of which, as 
man is the highest organic being, the human soul is the highest 
expression. He does not shrink from informing us that — 

It is his faith that every flower 
Enjoys the air it breathes. 

And his opinion of a dull, carnal-minded man, who has no eye 
to the hidden mysteries of the material universe, is expressed in 
"Peter Bell"— 

A primrose by the river's brim 
A yellow primrose was to him — 
And it was nothing more. 

The poet cannot encounter in his walk a bed of daffodils 
fluctuating in the breeze, without describing them as 
Outvying the waves in glee. 



THE LAKE POETS. 93 



And in a nutting expedition he feels a sense of pain from 
having violated the quiet of the woods : — 

Then up I rose, 
And dragged to earth both branch and bough with crash, 
And merciless ravage ; and the shady nook 
Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower, 
Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up 
Their quiet being : and unless I now 
Confound my present feelings with the past, 
Even then, when from the bower I turned away 
Exulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings, 
I felt a sense of pain when I beheld 
The silent trees and the intruding sky ; — 
Then, dearest maiden, move along these shades 
In gentleness of heart ; with gentle hand 
Touch — for there is a spirit in the woods. * 

In his youth, the poet says — 

The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion. The tall rock, 
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood — 
Their colours and their forms — were then to me 
An appetite : a feeling and a love 
That had no need of a remoter chasm, 
By thought supplied. 

But, later on, this feeling assumed the shape of a moral 
principle : — 

For I have learned 
To look on nature — not as in the time 
Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes 
The still, sad music of humanity, 
Not hoarse nor grating, though of awful power 
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts : a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 

* Nutting. 



94 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



And the round ocean, and the living air, 

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man 

A motion and a spirit that impels 

All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 

And rolls through all things. Therefore, am I still 

A lover of the mountains and the woods, 

Well pleased to recognise 
In nature and the language of the sense, 
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
The guide, the guardian of my heart and soul — 
Of all my moral being. 

Early, says Wordsworth, the Wanderer had learnt to reve- 
rence the Bible — 

But in the mountains did he feel his faith, 
Responsive to the writing ; all things there 
Breathed immortality — revolving life 
And greatness still revolving. Infinite 
There, littleness was not ; the least of things 
Seemed infinite ; and there his spirit shaped 
Her prospects.* 

■* % •* * * 

What soul was his, when from the naked top 
Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun 
Rise up and bathe the world in light ! He looked, — 
Ocean and earth — the solid frame of earth 
And ocean's liquid mass, beneath him lay 
In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched, 
And in their silent faces did he read 
Unutterable love. Sound needed none, 
Nor any voice of joy ; his spirit drank 
The spectacle. Sensation, soul, and form 
All melted into him ; they swallowed up 
His animal being. In them did he live, 
And by them did he live — they were his life.f 

It was a theory of Malebranche, that we view nature in God. 
But the doctrine, which Wordsworth appears almost uncon- 
sciously to have espoused, views God in nature. But the most 

* " Excursion," Book First. f Ibid. 



THE LAKE POETS. 95 

glorious manifestation of nature is the human mind. All the 
divine intelligences with which religion has peopled heaven, or 
the countless hosts of misshapen fiends which are represented 
as crowding the lowest pit of Erebus, these the poet views as 
mere phantoms, which he passes unterrified, — 

All strength, all terror, single or in bands, 
That ever was put forth in personal form, 
Jehovah with his thunder, and the choir 
Of ministering angels, and the empyreal thrones, 
I pass them unalarmed. 

The poet reserves all his fear and awe for the mind of man, 

To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil. 

That Wordsworth's views, even as to the orthodox sense of the 
account of the fall in Genesis, were by no means fixed, is 
evident from a passage parenthetically thrown into the text of 
" The Excursion : " — 

From these pure heights 
(Whether of actual vision, sensible 
To sight and feeling, or that in this sort 
Have condescendingly been shadow'd forth 
Communications spiritually maintained 
And intuitions moral and divine) 
Fell human kind. 

This allusion to the worship of the Jews is followed by a 
description of the origin of the worship of the Egyptian, the Per- 
sian, and the Greek, Now the common principle running 
throughout all these details is, that these various worships owe 
their birth to the reverence which nature has inspired in the 
breasts of different races, who gave their spiritual intuitions 
various external embodiments, according to the constitution of 
their minds. The Jews see, or think they see, angels on their 
mountain tops. They hear, or think they hear, Jehovah's 
voice in the thunder or the wind. The Greeks beheld sporting 



96 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

oreads in the fleeting sunbeams, and naiads in the rills. The 
Egyptians beheld in the spangled dome of the sky the residence 
of Belus, and built towers, on the top of which they erected mag- 
nificent shrines for his repose. The Persians beheld in the sun 
earth's universal Lord, and on the peaks of mountains worshipped 
Him with sacrifices and with hymns. If the difference between 
these faiths is a matter of mere moral or spiritual intuition, 
the only distinction between the worship of the Jews and their 
neighbours is, that both adored the same invisible power, only 
under different external manifestations. Even the poet imagines 
there is a moral sympathy in nature akin to the moral feeling in 
man, which is outraged by the wanton violation of moral laws, 
as in the language of Milton, which he cites as an illustration 
of the principle : — 

Earth trembled from her entrails, as again 

In pangs, and nature gave a second groan : 

Sky lowered, and muttering thunder, some sad drops 

Wept at completion of the mortal sin. 

The external universe is a temple, of which our poet repre- 
sents himself as the priest. The wicked at her shrine may 
have their hearts purified. No one can habitually contemplate 
natural scenery with a loving spirit, without feeling a shower of 
holy influences sanctifying his mind. Hence, with Words- 
worth, this cultivation of nature assumes the appearance of a 
religion. It is a source of the purest joy — the fount of per- 
petual and ever-enduring pleasures. The worldly spirit of 
prudence which tends to neutralize this passion for nature 
within us, he reprobates to so great an extent, as to prefer the 
Greek mythology for his creed without the modern system of 
barter, than any other religion with it : — 

The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers ; 
Little we see in nature that is ours. 
We have thrown our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon, 



THE LAKE POETS. 97 

The winds that will be howling at all hours, 

But now are folded up like sleeping flowers, — 

With each and all of these we're out of tune. 

It moves us not. Great God ! I'd rather be 

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn, 

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 

Have glimpses which would make me less forlorn, 

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 

For, in truth, philosophically speaking, there is not much 
difference between the ancient and modern worshipper of 
nature. Both in substance believed in a pervading soul, 
throwing out external manifestations of beauty. They only 
differ about the name and the personification of the power. 
But this difference did not make one less than the other a 
devotee at the shrine of material spiritualism. The poet even 
tells us that he beat the Greek, in the keen appreciation of 
the spirit which haunted his visions, and which he most 
worshipped : — 

Beauty, a living presence of the earth, 

Surpassing the most fair ideal forms, 

Which craft of delicate spirits had composed 

From earth's materials, waits upon my steps, 

Pitches her tents before me as I move, 

An hourly neighbour — Paradise and groves 

Elysian, fortunate fields — like those of old 

Sought in the Atlantic main ; why should they be 

A history only of departed things ? 

Or a mere fiction of what never was ? 

For the discerning intellect of man, 

When wedded to this goodly universe, 

In love and holy passion, shall find these 

A simple produce of the common day. 

This deification of the powers of nature; this attempt to 
purify the grosser feelings by communing with lake and moun- 
tain ; this belief that Paradise and the Elysian fields were ab- 
stract conceptions of the same keen insight into the spiritual 

7 



98 ESTTMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

harmonies of the universe, and were not only not dead but 
might exist for ever, enjoyable and enjoyed upon this earth of 
ours ; this effort to break down the antithesis between mind and 
matter, and show that they are both only different conceptions 
of the same substance ; I am at a loss to conceive how these 
things can be reconciled, I will not say with the Thirty-nine 
Articles, but with the essential constituents of the Christian 
faith. The belief in the perfectibility of human nature, or its 
paradisal felicity on this earth, is utterly at war with the doc- 
trine of the fall. The Church, also, claims as its special prero- 
gative, the purification of the heart. It would exclude from its 
bosom as an idolater the man who should worship nature, or 
declare that the pageantry of the universe constituted the life, 
the very nutriment of his spiritual being. Yet this language is 
held of, and by, a character in whose mouth the poet places 
sentiments which show that — 

Though a heathen in the spiritual part, 
He was a right good Christian at the heart. 

And the poet does not leave him alone as the exponent of the 
hybrid mixture of the pantheism of Pythagoras with the doc- 
trines of Christ, but he represents him as calling in a village 
clergyman to assist him in the task. This gentleman is in his 
natural position, when he descants upon the fortunes of the 
more romantic of his parishioners, whose graves lie at his feet ; 
but when he is made to endorse the poet's pantheism, and to 
wind up a poem, whose grand feature is the investiture of the 
love of nature with the functions of religion, by a conventicle 
harangue, wherein all the benefits which many people aver 
ecclesiastical institutions in this country have striven to prevent, 
are ascribed to their influence, then the poet has succeeded in 
placing the kerb-stone to the contrarieties which pervade his 
work, and leaves his readers with very conflicting ideas as to the 
main scope and object of his poem. The fact is, Wordsworth 
was both a Chartist and a Tory, a Pantheist as well as a 



THE LAKE POETS. 99 

Churchman : it is, therefore, not surprising that the work into 
which he flung all his energies should reflect the contrarieties 
of his mind. 

This system of viewing the domestic affections and emotional 
sympathies, to the exclusion of the intellect, as vehicles of in- 
spiration, appears to have led Wordsworth to the notion that 
the Deity holds more intimate communication with childhood, 
when the reason is dead and the feelings paramount, than with 
any other phase of existence. This creed he has developed in 
an ode which will last as long as the English language. Here, 
he says, among other things — 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : 
The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
Hath had. elsewhere its setting, 

And cometh from afar ; 

Not in entire forgetfulness, 

And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 

From God, who is our home : 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy ! 
Shades of the prison-house begin to close 

Upon the growing boy : 
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows. 

He sees it in his joy, 
The youth who daily farther from the east 
Must travel, still is Nature's priest, 

And by the vision splendid 

Is on his way attended. 
At length the man perceives it die away. 
And fade into the light of common day. 

And again, in " The Excursion : " — 

Thou who didst wrap the cloud 

Of infancy around us, that Thyself, 

Therein, with our simplicity awhile 

Might'st hold, on earth, communion undisturbed.* 

This opinion of Wordsworth, so grandly expounded, would 

* " Excursion," Book Fourth. 



ioo ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

seem to derive some confirmation from Comte's theory that the 
stage of infancy, like that of the youth of the world, is dominated 
by the theological element. In childhood, everything presents 
the appearance of the marvellous. We imagine ourselves in 
direct intercourse with invisible spirits, that angels or demons 
lurk in every corner, that heaven lies about our housetops. But 
Comte regarded these impressions as naked delusions — mere 
infantine dreams, and nothing more ; whereas the poet clings to 
them as substantial realities, though this belief stands out in 
glaring contradiction to those Pantheistic views he so earnestly 
embodies in other portions of his works. This theory is, also, as 
much in conflict with scientific views, on the one hand, as with 
theological notions on the other. If the soul of man be but a 
higher organization of the same element which pervades the 
inorganic world, how can it be said to flow directly out of 
heaven ? We are informed by the theologians upon whom our 
poet relied, that the soul is cut off from all communication with 
the Deity, from birth upwards, until the baptismal rite has been 
performed ; and if this be neglected, as it is in the great majo- 
rity of the human race, childhood is passed in more or less sub- 
servience to the devil. But I am not aware that the affections 
and emotional sympathies are weaker in unbaptised infants 
than with others. This view, which alone derives support, in 
a religious sense, from the innocence and guilelessness of 
children, and from Christ's predilection for their society, hardly 
forms a consistent basis for a theory, which cuts up the doc- 
trine of the Fall by the roots, and which makes every step in 
intellectual expansion a further remove from the influence of 
the Deity. Take the theory by itself, without any reference to 
the writer's doctrinal opinions, and it is specious enough ; but fit 
it as a "little shrine " into a Gothic church or pantheistic temple, 
and it becomes as utterly incongruous as. a baptismal font in 
a Mohammedan mosque. It is this miscellaneous blending of 
conflicting views, which so largely detracts from the merits of 
Wordsworth's great poem. Detached portions of the piece are 



THE LAKE POETS. 101 

splendidly elaborated, and, viewed singly, powerfully impress 
the imagination. It is only when we link the incongruous 
assemblage together that we are startled at the conflicting ele- 
ments — at the jargon of systems presented to us, in the same 
piece of workmanship, as an instance of harmonious design and 
unity of purpose. This strange medley of contrary principles 
was not only at war with Wordsworth's religious opinions, 
but with the views of everybody else. And when a philosophical 
poet adopts theories which are contradictory in themselves, and, 
in their collective embodiment, at war with everybody else's 
notions on the same subject, he falls into a mistake similar to 
that of the representative poet who introduces into his work 
false manners and unnatural sentiments ; for, reason is violated 
in the one case, quite as much as nature in the other. Yet, 
despite of these great drawbacks, so preeminent are the beau- 
ties of the piece in their individual aspects, and so obtuse the 
national mind to mere philosophic inconsistencies, that " The 
Excursion" seems destined to hold its place as one of the first 
didactic poems in the English language. 

Wordsworth embodies so much discursive description in his 
great poem, illustrates so many chance topics, uninformed with 
any idea of unity, as to bring the " Task " nearer to it than 
any other poem in our literature. But the " Task," which most 
nearly approaches it in tone, lacks design, and therefore cannot 
be said to come within the range of didactic poetry at all ; 
while the "Essay on Man," which resembles it in design, 
fails in imaginative embodiment and poetic execution. Pope 
uses verse as the vehicle of reason. In his " Essay," he 
seldom touches the emotional sensibilities. His appeals are 
always to the intellect. The imaginative faculty is only inci- 
dentally called in to illustrate argument, and never to awaken 
sympathy. The whole piece is a discussion upon abstract ethics. 
With Wordsworth, the heart is much more engaged than the 
head. He does not strive so much to convince the intellect as 
to enlist the sympathies. Purity of feeling, moral worth, lofty 



io2 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

emotion, and delicate sensibility, if he can win these to his side, 
he readily abandons to others 5 dialectic skill, as something 
extraneous to the vocation of the poet. Cowper, though he 
addresses himself far more to the general elements of our nature 
than Pope, dilates upon every casual subject which falls in his 
way. He has no aim except to blend morality with his 
multifarious descriptions of external nature. His reflections, as 
those of Wordsworth, seem called forth by every random object, 
like the tones of a lyre whose strings are abandoned to the 
passing gale. Cowper, however, never touches the heart with 
pity, or ever attempts to spiritualize nature till it assumes the 
form of ideal existence. But Wordsworth, while thoroughly 
human, rises completely out of the common-place sphere. 
The mind, purified from its grosser feelings by keen sympathy 
with the lowest forms of suffering, is carried by him to ethereal 
heights, where nature, glowing with the sun-bursts of Claude, 
seems endued with a spirituality diviner than that of man. The 
essence of nature is viewed as the outward manifestation of the 
power of which the soul is the interior image. Between both 
there is mutual kinship, each drawing from the other that 
which it most wants, until by the blending of spiritual efful- 
gence with material pomp of imagery, both are incorporated 
into one dream of ideal existence. The functions of the Greek 
drama with modern dramatic incidents are thus united to a 
philosophy which glasses the divine perfections in the universe 
as in a mirror, and infatuates the soul so much with their beauty 
as to incline it to mistake the shadow for the reality. 

But the exclusion of the higher types of humanity from his 
pages, the absence of any attempt to depict the deeper phases 
of passion, or to vitalize the human energies in connection with 
the lofty themes of war or ambition, or to illumine the darker 
shades of existence by the soft emotions of love, must keep 
Wordsworth from occupying so high a position as those who 
have shown themselves competent to shine in these subjects, 
and whose muse has ranged at will through all the regions 



THE LAKE POETS. 103 

capable of interesting the heart of man. Hence, Wordsworth 
must be placed below Pope and even Byron, from the fact that 
though supreme in the didactic poem, he lacks the faculty, 
which they possessed in an uncommon degree, of storming the 
breast-works of the heart, by the embodiment of all the phases 
of passion. In the delineation of character, in the framing of inci- 
dent, and in the constructive power of impregnating disjointed 
materials with one common life, he is likewise lamentably defi- 
cient. He is also too fond of forcing his individual feelings upon 
the reader, instead of entering fully into the feelings of others. 
These negative qualities must exclude Wordsworth from a fore- 
most place in the second rank. But he is entitled to as high a 
position in it as supreme excellence in the reflective faculty, pro- 
found pathos, and ideal delineation of natural objects can place 
him. For he has bound man closer to nature by a thousand 
links of association and feeling, and intertwined the meanest 
objects of creation with the fibres of the human heart. In 
this respect he may be said to have placed in our hands a new 
fulcrum for the elevation of humanity. For the universe be- 
comes in his verse a temple, through the portals of which man 
is ushered into the presence of the divinity. It is this inter- 
fusion of nature and the human soul in the substance of a 
higher spiritual being, that enables him to hallow the com- 
monest events with a feeling of the infinite, to move, as it were, 
in an atmosphere of sublimity by illustrating the splendid ana- 
logues which bind man with the universe, and merge both in 
the existence of God himself. 



io4 EST1MA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



WORDSWORTH appears to have derived much of his 
material spiritualism from Coleridge, as Byron sub- 
sequently did from Shelley. The two poets who narrowly 
escaped each other at Cambridge* were thrown much together 
in later life, and there can be little doubt that the philosophy 
of Schelling, which Coleridge had mastered in Germany, was 
made to cast its glittering veil over the thoughts of his com- 
panion. Of Coleridge's admiration for Wordsworth, the Bio- 
graphic* Literaria is evidence, one half of which is taken up 
with a panegyric of his works. Of Wordsworth's admiration 
for Coleridge, the noble passage in the sixth book of the 
"Prelude" is no less conclusive, which also shows to what 
extent his companion's dreamy speculations had haunted the 
writer's mind : — 

Of rivers, fields, 
And groves I speak to thee, my friend, to thee 
Who yet a liveried schoolboy in the depths 
Of the huge city, on the leaded roof 
Of that wide edifice, thy school's home, 
Wert used to lie and gaze upon the clouds 
Moving in heaven ; or of that pleasure tired, 
To shut thine eyes, and by internal light 
See trees and meadows, and thy native stream 
Far distant, thus beheld from year to year 

Of a long tribe 

I have thought 

* See Wordsworth's " Prelude," b. vi. 



THE LAKE POETS. 105 



Of thee, thy learning, gorgeous eloquence, 

And all the strength and plumage of thy youth, 

Thy subtle speculations, toils abstruse 

Among the schoolmen, and Platonic forms 

Of wild ideal pageantry, shaped out 

From things well matched or ill, and words for things, 

The self-created sustenance of a mind 

Debarred from Nature's living images, 

Compelled to be a life unto herself, 

And unrelentingly progressed by thirst 

Of greatness, love, and beauty. 

The two companions supplemented each other's verses. 
They interchanged suggestions. They published poetry in 
common ; and Coleridge, even more than Wordsworth, viewed 
the different appearances of nature as so many modifications 
of the everlasting mind : — 

It were a vain endeavour, 

Though I should gaze for ever 

On that fair light that lingers in the west ; 

I may not hope from outward forms to win 

The passion and the life whose fountains are within. 

O Lady ! we receive but what we give, 

And in our life alone does nature live ; 

Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud.* 

Coleridge, however, repudiated Wordsworth's views respect- 
ing the baldness of poetic language, and the confining the 
region of the muse to the hamlet and the smithy. He even 
soared beyond the sphere of reflection into the higher one 
of passion, but into passion so etherealized that it may be fairly 
called the metaphysics of love. There is no voluptuousness, 
no swoonings on the breast of his beloved, no absorption of 
the animal functions in the imperious desires awakened by 
incarnate loveliness, but at best a dreaming reverie, a melan- 
choly spirituality, with moonlight as a background, projecting 
in front the pale shadows of a coy lover and a bashful mistress. 

* Ode to Dejection. 



106 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Such are his pictures of Genevieve and Christabel — creations 
which, though of the highest spiritual beauty, seem rather the 
product of an ethereal fancy refined by abstract theories 
than the genuine flesh and blood embodiments of our earth. 
In fact, the ethical views which Coleridge and Wordsworth 
had intruded into the sphere of art, however suited to the 
delineation of nature, were quite out of place in the represen- 
tation of human feelings and passions. The advantage, there- 
fore, which Coleridge had over Wordsworth in a wider range of 
subject, he did not turn to much account, while he falls in- 
finitely below him in developing the many-sided relations of 
nature to humanity. In contrasting, however, the two men, it 
is not fair to overlook their widely different positions. Fortune 
made for the one munificent provision, and gave him health to 
enjoy it, while poverty and disease continued, like avenging 
furies, to buffet Coleridge, and drove him a homeless wanderer 
over the earth. It was, therefore, quite natural that the one 
should concentrate his mind upon a series of lofty efforts, 
while the other should, only, as it were, take up his harp when 
the fit was on him, to abandon it when the first glow of 
heat had subsided, or the struggle for existence called him 
away. Yet in the fragments he has left, he has shown greater 
representative power in dealing with human incident than 
Wordsworth. He also excels him in the embodiment of 
character and in lyrical sweetness ; but in genuine simplicity, 
deep pathos, and the ideal delineation of nature, he is so inferior 
to Wordsworth that the points in which he stands above him 
are lost sight of altogether. 

It must, however, be allowed that there was that desultori- 
ness in the mind of Coleridge, that disposition to grasp at 
everything and really master nothing, that love for bewildering 
digressions, that fluctuation of resolve, inconstancy of purpose 
in all he undertook, which would have been fatal to pre- 
eminent success in any branch of art, even had Coleridge 
been, what assuredly he was not, the spoilt child of Fortune. 



THE LAKE POETS. 107 

No sooner had he broken into one subject than it was laid 
down for another. If one day he was toiling in the labyrinth 
of German metaphysics, the next he was sure to be buried in 
astrological lore, or in speculations about the millennium, which 
were in turn destined to be pushed aside for some abstruse 
theories about Shakespeare's relations to art. There was the 
same inconstancy in his convictions as in his pursuits, for Cole- 
ridge was always the victim of the reigning impression domi- 
nating his mind. By turns he became a visionary republican, 
a practical socialist, a dreaming theosophist, an inveterate 
Tory. For the conventicle he gave up the church, and aban- 
doned both for Spinozism, only to come round to the church 
again. In such a fluctuating region there was no fixed strata 
in which the offshoots of poetry could take firm root; for 
ideas require time to ripen like everything else. Nor will artistic 
genius ever come to maturity if its productions have to be un- 
ceasingly plucked up and planted in new soil, or developed 
under opposing contrarieties of belief. The imagination of a 
man who changes his convictions with each revolving moon 
can never be fired, or his conceptions struck out, with that 
heat which is necessary for the production of grand and 
striking impressions. These, fixity and earnestness of thought 
can alone supply. It would have been as reasonable to expect 
umbrageous oaks to spring up out of a strata of shifting 
sand as great works from a mind so changeable and fluctuating 
as Coleridge's. 

This uncertainty of tenure in the poet's intellectual domain, 
combined with his love for abstract speculation, make his crea- 
tions seem but the reflex of the broken and disjointed efforts of 
his life. Nothing is complete ; all is fragmentary and unreal, 
having little relation with the outside world, and wanting that 
coloured variety of woof and warp which destiny had blended 
in the web of his career. Few pass through so many strange 
phases of existence as Coleridge, — collegian, soldier, dramatic 
lecturer, moralist, newspaper scribe, preacher, Colonial Secre- 



108 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

tary, habitual tourist, and metaphysician. Had one tithe of his 
experiences in these varied characters been reproduced in his 
poems, they would have presented a charming diversity of 
aspect. But the airy abstractions in which he indulged, and 
the narcotic which he swallowed as an antidote to bodily 
infirmities, threw over all his pieces the same silken veil of 
dreamy sentimentality. Hence there is little of the ring of 
actual life in his poems. We wander in his pages through a 
hall of magnificent torsos as if by moonlight, but the sense of 
beauty with which they haunt us is dimmed with the regret 
that the sculptor did not finish his statues, and bring them out 
on their pedestals into actual day. " Christabel" contains more 
genuine poetry, as far as it goes, than anything of the same 
kind in Scott or Wordsworth. But there it lies, tantalizing us 
with conjectures which its creator could not solve in any way 
satisfactory to himself. He therefore left the mystery unex- 
plained to exercise the ingenuity of critics. In the " Dark 
Ladie," "Genevieve," "The Three Graves," "Kubla Khan," 
the "Wanderings of Cain," and " Hymn to the Earth," we find 
the same fragmentary and visionary treatment. It is hard to 
believe that one who can execute so well the little he attempts, 
could not complete the intellectual feast to which he invites us ; 
but where we are so systematically compelled to content our- 
selves with fragments, the conclusion is forced upon us of the 
incompetency of the host to provide a regular entertainment. 

If I were asked to individualize the character of Coleridge's 
poetry, I should place its distinctive feature in bringing into 
prominence the relations of man with the spiritual universe. 
Wordsworth merges man into nature, Coleridge nature into 
man. The material world in his verses is either lost sight of, 
or refined away until the spiritual peers through its shell like 
the moon through a cloud, deriving fresh lustre from illumining 
the gauze-like vapours which vainly strive to hide its light from 
earth. In this branch of his art, the "Ancient Mariner" is un- 
rivalled. The punishment of man's thoughtlessness in dis- 



THE LAKE POETS. 109 

lodging a spirit by shooting the alabatross, the spectre bark and 
its two skeleton inmates dicing for the possession of the cul- 
prit, the conversation of the weird powers over the vessel 
impelled onward by invisible agency, the reanimation of the 
dead bodies of the sailors by an angelic troupe, who cast them 
off again to reassume their own bright forms, — all these project 
the spiritual world so prominently in the foreground as to 
make the material seem nothing but its fluctuating shadow. 
Again, in " Christabel," we have the substance of a tale repre- 
senting a lady suffering for the faults of her lover, who is 
restored to peace by the pains so vicariously endured. But a 
spirit, in the person of Geraldine, was designed as the instru- 
ment of the change, through whom, as a flood-gate, the light 
of the spiritual universe was to stream on material creation. 
There is something very weird-like and novel in the path 
Coleridge thus struck out for himself; but to make efforts of 
this kind powerfully impress the imagination, they must not 
only be complete in themselves, but definitely connected with 
the real world. Coleridge's poems, however, from his failure in 
these two particulars, frequently assume the appearance of 
dreams. His whole life appears to have been a hunt after 
material shadows. It is only when he draws creatures from the 
clouds that he gets among realities. 

Apart from this disposition to sink the material in the spiritual, 
there is nothing in the poetry of Coleridge that would cha- 
racterise a writer of pre-eminent rank in those departments 
which he selected for the exercise of his skill. His muse 
is rather tender and sweet than pathetic and grand. Fancy in 
him struggles with imagination for mastery ; but his imagina- 
tion generally embodies the beautiful, and seldom the 
sublime. It is rarely informed with lofty images, or fired by 
splendid passion. We are always charmed with its strokes, but 
never absolutely carried off our feet. The music is perfect, the 
imagery is striking, and the execution as far as it goes leaves 
little on the score of harmony to be desired ; but deep pathos, 



1 10 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

or startling contrasts, or any whirlwind of emotion, or rapid 
gusts of feeling, or a quick succession of bold figures, or com- 
pleteness of conception arising spontaneously out of the 
structural unity of parts, we look for in vain. Hence, his 
success in the ode I should hardly call first-rate. And he cuts 
by no means so good a figure in the drama as he does in the 
ode. Few only of his fugitive pieces are of a high order of 
merit ; but even were they all so, these would not, from the 
contemplative element which abounds in them, place him in the 
front rank. It is upon his position as a narrative poet, and as 
a narrative poet alone, that Coleridge must rest his principal 
claim to distinction. But the visionary and disjointed pieces 
which he has left us in this walk of his art, are not such as 
to entitle him to a place in the second division of poets, 
though they display genius which, had they been properly 
developed and matured, would undoubtedly have done so. 

It is, therefore, to be regretted that one who appeared so 
capable of weaving enchanting melodies out of lofty themes, of 
ennobling man's nature by connecting him with the infinite, of 
setting right the tortuosities of the lower world by the laws of 
the higher, who exercised so potent a spell over spiritual forms 
that he could bring down their images with such effulgence as 
to dim the actual into shade, should have frittered away the 
great bulk of his energies in spasmodic effort, or in eking out 
a scanty provision for the common necessities of nature. Had 
society been juster to Coleridge, he might have been truer to 
himself. As it was, he early lost his sense of manly indepen- 
dence by having to lean on the bounty of others. This sucked 
the soul out of poetic inspiration, and drove him, as he sings 
himself, to seek relief in philosophic studies : — 

There was a time * * * 

When Hope grew round me, like the twining vine, 
And fruits and foliage, not my own, seemed mine. 
But now afflictions bow me down to the earth, 
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth ; 



THE LAKE POETS. 



But, oh ! each visitation 
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, 

My shaping spirit of imagination. 
For not to think of what I needs must feel, 

But to be still and patient all I can ; 
And haply by abstruse research to steal 

From my own nature all the natural man : 

This was my sole resource, my only plan, 
Till that which suits a part infects the whole, 
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul. * 

Coleridge, then, was driven by sheer force of circumstances 
to divide his allegiance between poetry and philosophy. He 
fell between two stools. Both claim him for their own, and 
both suffered from the too constant intrusion of its rival. 
Even now among his countrymen, he stands higher as a 
metaphysician than as a poet. But there can hardly be a 
doubt that, as philosophy becomes more known, this judgment 
will be reversed. For an accurate thinker Coleridge was not ; 
while as a poet, could his imagination have found free vent, 
could his keen perception have been unassailed by the coarse 
clamours of material existence, he would probably have left 
productions behind him second to none of his age. 

* Ode to Dejection. 



1 1 2 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH FOE TS. 



THE Lake poets had a decided objection to be classed to- 
gether as a school. Coleridge remonstrated with Jeffrey 
on this head, who promised to strike his name out of the firm. 
"I" he said, "object to Wordsworth's hobbies about child- 
hood and the rustic nature of poetic language. Why, then, 
class me as one of his sect?" Southey was no less remonstra- 
tive. " I," said the author of " Thalaba," " dislike the lyrical 
ballads. Besides, two or three of my epics were written before 
I knew Wordsworth. It is, therefore, a blunder to place me in 
the same boat with him and Coleridge." These protests were 
rational enough, so far as regarded the different styles in which 
each poet worked out the same system. But they could not 
obliterate the identity of the principles which permeate the 
entire body of their poetry. Wordsworth is eminently psycho- 
logical; Coleridge fantastically mystical; and Southey gor- 
geously objective. But none recognise the sensuous phases of 
that keen passion which lovers feel for each other; each lay 
the same stress upon the domestic affections as the great in- 
strument in the hands of the muse for exalting human nature ; 
each intrude the ethical principle into every department of 
their art ; each consider simplicity of language as the form, and 
love of nature as the soul, of all true poetry; each regarded 
Pope as one of the lowest, and Cowper as one of the highest 
names in the English Parnassus. It was this unity of principle 
which has associated these writers in one class, notwithstanding 



THE LAKE POETS. 113 

their clamorous assertions of self-independence and mutual 
dislike for each other's peculiarities. 

It would seem that this desire of the Lake poets, each to 
stand upon his own basis, arose more or less from a feeling 
that they would lose somewhat of that intellectual height which 
each vainly flattered himself he was about to attain, if he had 
not reached the loftiest eminence already. For the Lake poets 
were above any other class of men gifted with a large amount 
of self-conceit, and with no ordinary sense of their own im- 
portance. Wordsworth would pull out his pieces with the 
ostentation of Statius, and exclaim, " If you don't admire that, 
you can have no discernment of the pure and beautiful in art." 
He told Crabbe Robinson he could not respect the mother 
who could read without emotion his poem, 

" Once in a lonely hamlet I sojourned ; " 

and he assured him that any reader who did not appreciate 

" Two voices are there, one is of the sea," 

must be singularly deficient in intellectual refinement and moral 
purity. It is rich to hear Coleridge ascribe the first unpopularity 
of " The Ancient Mariner" to being linked with such stuff as 
"Peter Bell;" and Wordsworth repay the compliment by 
ascribing the unpopularity of " Peter Bell" to being weighted 
with "The Ancient Mariner." But Southey left his two 
compeers far behind in the vanity of self-adulation. His 
" History of Brazil " he compared to " Herodotus," and his 
" Madoc" to the "Odyssey." In one of his laureate odes he 
thus addresses himself, — 

Thou whom rich nature at thy happy birth, 
Blest in her bounty with the largest dower 
That Heaven indulges to a child of earth. 

And he subsequently informs his readers that all the good and 
wise admire him. He once kidnapped Shelley into his study 

8 



1 14 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS, 

at Keswick, under the delusion that he had a fine treat in store 
for him, and, after he secured the doors, pulled out the 
voluminous' roll of " Madoc," with which he dosed his hearer 
until the young enthusiast fell asleep under the table.* 
Southey has left it on record that he considered Scott's poems, 
in comparison to his own, as the mere offshoots of the cabbage- 
garden, contrasted in point of durability with the umbrageous 
oaks of the forest. t It does not speak much for his sincerity 
that, while expressing such opinions, he should in a letter to Sir 
Walter, of the same date, congratulate that gentleman on having, 
together with himself, scaled the highest summits of Parnassus. 
What Scott thought of the compliment does not appear ; but, 
from the manner in which he tossed the laureateship to Southey, 
I fancy, he would have preferred going a little lower down, to 
sharing so exalted a position with his contemporary. But 
Scott's nature was chivalric. He had all the humility of a 
great genius. Instead of exalting himself at the expense of 
others, he saw so many defects in his own compositions that 
he could not bear to revert to them. He exclaimed, in the 
language of Macbeth, 

\ "I am ashamed 

\ To think on what I've done ; look on't again, 

\ I dare not." 

This humiliating feeling is the mark of a great artist who is 
impressed with the wide chasm existing between his own 
performances and that ideal type of excellence which is ever 
haunting his soul. But where we get as its substitute a spirit 
of self-laudation, a disposition to seize upon every opportunity 
which 1 resents itself, as a sort of platform for the mountebank 
exhibitioh of our own excellences, there the highest style of 
art cannot exist. 

Though Southey stands much more apart from Coleridge 

\ * Jefferson Hogg's ' ' Life of Shelley. " 

+ " Southey^s Letters," in the Correspondence of Rt. Hon. J. W. Croker. 



THE LAKE POETS. 115 

and Wordsworth than these do from each other, there is none 
in whom the principles of the school are more offensively pre- 
dominant. In subjective poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge, 
who drew their stores out of their own minds, it was natural 
that their creations should reflect their own peculiar habits of 
thought; but Southey was a poet eminently objective. His aim 
was to reproduce the actual ; and, therefore, when he attempted 
to build up lofty epics, illustrating national characteristics, upon 
the foundation of one-half of human nature, the result was a 
successive series of failures. Love is the cardinal passion of the 
human race. But Southey is at as much pains to keep his 
pages free from any spontaneous burst of that passion as if his 
poems, like the Greek plays, were intended as solemn adjuncts 
to a religious festival. His lovers, therefore, behave as coldly 
to each other as brother and sister. They are only so many 
abstract embodiments of the domestic virtues. The conse- 
quence is that a dreary pall of monotony hangs over most of 
his poems. His incidents lack variety • his characters want relief. 
For sallies of inspiration, we get only amplifications of rhetoric ; 
for exquisite touches of nature, stilted sentimentality. He is 
in some measure obliged to be starch, and affected, and ex- 
travagant ; for in making use only of one-half of the elements 
of our common nature, he has to inflate the other half into 
undue proportions — t.o exaggerate a part until it bears some 
semblance to the whole. 

To reproduce the actual, to make the past live over again 
in the present, requires a poet of very liberal sympathies, and 
with some practical acquaintance with the feelings, tenden- 
cies, and struggles of his own generation. But in both these 
qualities Southey was singularly deficient. Whether as regards 
the constructive powers within, or his knowledge, or his appre- 
ciation, of the real world without, he was about the last man to 
shape into so many living actualities the events of any spirit- 
stirring drama. His sympathies were narrow, and his expe- 
rience of men as confined as his sympathies. The bigoted 



1 16 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

unitarianism of his youth was only exchanged for a still more 
bigoted Calvinism in his mature age. Even Coleridge, en- 
sheathed as he was in the glittering armour of the German phi- 
losophies, failed to inoculate his companion's hard mind with 
any insight into those distinctions which have revolutionized 
metaphysical science. Out of the contracted circle in which his 
views were confined, he seldom looked, except to hiss out, in 
short glittering epigrammatic sentences, his dislikes for the dense 
bulk of humanity lying beyond his own pale of orthodoxy. 
That such a man should confine himself to his library, and 
abandon the great world for books, was strictly in keeping with 
his mental constitution, and with the exclusive doctrines that 
constitution had espoused ; but that he should attempt to 
rival Homer or Dante was a serious blunder. His habits acted 
upon his temperament, and his exclusive opinions upon both, 
to generate that state of mind in which any truthful delinea- 
tion of mankind, engaged upon the broad highways of human 
action, was a sheer impossibility. 

Southey's strong point is the delineation of natural scenery ; 
the weakest, the selection of commonplace topics, which, in 
his epics, he amplifies with such prolixity that the jaded reader 
abandons the subject through very irksomeness of the flesh. 
The avoiding all passionate emotions which would conflict 
with his system of ethics necessarily narrowed the variety of 
combinations into which he could mould his fable, and threw 
him upon the upholsteries of his subject. His characters, in 
consequence of not being brought into positions in which their 
genuine nature can be developed, are mere pasteboard crea- 
tions, and cease to interest us in proportion as they are removed 
from common life. In " Madoc " there were several incidents 
capable of romantic treatment, but these were ruthlessly thrust 
aside for embassies, state ceremonials, religious processions, 
jarring family discords, battles, and marriage feasts, not having 
the poor merit of being dovetailed into each other, but stand- 
ing apart like isolated facts within the memory of a disjointed 



THE LAKE POETS. 117 

experience. Madoc himself is one of those perfect cha 
racters of whom the reader entertains not the slightest hopes 
after the first half-dozen pages. His virtues, and those of his 
companions, whatever merit they might have in a sermon, are 
irreclaimably stupid in an epic. Southey appears to have 
laboured under the delusion that he could make prosaic topics 
interesting by the force of his rhetoric, as Wordsworth made 
prosaic characters interesting by the force of his genius. 

No poet could ever have a subject embracing more variety of 
romantic detail than " The Fall of Roderic." The shock of 
battles, diversified by the tale of innocent and guilty love ; the 
Christian faith sinking beneath the superior weight of the 
Mussulman, only to be restored by the rekindled fires of 
patriotism ; the archbishop forsaking his mitre for the turban, 
in order to satisfy the cravings of voluptuous passion, and the 
wilder dreams of a regal ambition; the contrast of Moorish 
costumes with the garb of Spanish mountaineers commingling, 
either in fight or festive revelry, among the most sublime and 
picturesque fastnesses of the Asturias ; the plotting chieftain 
and the ascetic monk; the faithless wife who achieves her 
husband's ruin, that she may consummate her guilty passion 
in the arms of his Moorish rival ; — all these formed the 
materials of a series of sensational groupings, which, in the 
hand of a master, would not have allowed the reader to lay 
down the book until the whole story had gone through his 
mind. But in the hands of Southey no interest is awakened ; 
the theme becomes dull and spiritless. There is not the 
slightest attempt at construction of plot. By-tales which might 
have formed agreeable episodes, if treated apart, are confusedly 
entangled with the main trunk of the story. No character 
excites our sympathy ; the sequence of no event, our curiosity. 
We are never made breathless with the untrammelling of con- 
sequences, or dazed with the electric shocks of passion, till 

" Function is smothered in surmise, 
And nothing is but what is not : " 



1 1 8 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

for the poet has here, as in " Madoc," the unhappy knack 
of passing over the romantic features of his story, while he 
reserves all his prolixity for the treatment of its baldest inci- 
dents, or of such topics as merely afford scope for objective 
imitation. The loves of Florinda and Roderic; Egelona's 
desertion of the Goth for the Moor ; the intrigues of Guisla and 
Oppas, — these hardly come in for a passing glance. But the 
reader is wearied to death with the pageantry of war, with the 
ceremony of knighthood, with the pomp of coronations, with the 
vagabond wanderings of Roderic, and insipid discussions upon 
free-will and fate, until he closes the book with despair, feeling 
that a great subject has been lost for want of a great master. 

Southey has shown more ability in "Thalaba" and "Kehama" 
than in " Madoc " or " Roderic." For here his talent for gorgeous 
scene-painting had fuller scope, and his want- of power to 
reproduce the actual is not so sensibly felt in the delineation 
of beings who belong to the fairy world of Eastern imagination. 
But it is this circumstance which must ever prevent these 
poems from acquiring a strong hold over the popular mind. 
We are too insulated to take much interest even in fiction 
intertwined with continental life and manners ; but when we 
come to tales enveloped in the crust of Indian or Arabian 
mythologies, stript of the passionate witchery and love intrigues 
which could alone make them life-like or interesting, our 
feelings amount to something like revulsion. The wizard 
tricks and demon enchantments which form the staple material 
of these poems • the embodiment of the filial virtues in the chief 
personages, and the complete manner in which the actors ignore 
all their flesh-and-blood impulses, make these stories suitable 
intellectual food for the nursery ; but the classical and ornate 
diction in which they are conveyed must always erect an im- 
passable barrier between them and the juvenile members of 
the community. 

Southey, it appears, had some idea of embodying the principal 
mythologies of the world in so many narrative poems, as 



THE LAKE POETS. 119 

Homer and Virgil in their epics had embodied the religion 
of Rome and Greece. Could he have done as much in 
"Kehama " and "Thalaba" for the creed of the Brahmin or 
the Mahometan, I readily allow, these epics, under one point 
of view, would have been natural, as representing the feelings 
and embodying the convictions of a large section of the human 
race. We should then have had a standard by which to judge 
of their propriety, of their truthfulness to nature, and of their 
adequacy as pictures of the state of society which they attempt 
to represent. But this is the very point in which the poet 
breaks down. No man would recognise in Thalaba the cold, 
austere, moonstruck vagrant, dead to all charms of female 
voluptuousness, a type of his race, any more than in the 
chaste Oneiza, one of those seductive houri, the indulgence in 
whose multiplied society, and not their solitary companionship, 
constitutes the Mahometan's highest conception of bliss. The 
fact is, Southey has combined with the external ritual, ablutions, 
and prayers of Mahometanism, the sombre virtues and rewards 
of Calvinistic Christianity, — a combination as incongruous as 
the blending of summer and winter in the same picture. In 
"Kehama," the same grotesque associations are carried out. 
Though the Hindoo and Mahometan religions stand out in 
bold conflict with each other, Southey can see no other points 
of difference but the omission of the ablutions, and the intro- 
duction of more supernatural spheres, giving wider scope to 
pantomimic trick and wizard machinery. There is hardly a 
character, or combination of incidents, in the one story which 
has not its counterpart in the other. Kailyal is only another 
name for Oneiza, and Ladurlad for Moath, as Kehama is for 
Mohareb, Khawla for the Lorrinite, and Thalaba for Glendoveer. 
Oneiza is attempted to be ravished by Aloadin, as Kailyal is 
by Arvalan. The palatial structures of Shedad correspond to 
those of the submarine city of Baly, and the cave of Dom- 
daniel to the vaults of Padalon. Where the incidents are varied 
in " Kehama," it is rather to remove the story to a still farther 



120 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

distance from the Hindoo system, than to bring us closer to it. 
In that system, if one thing be more prominent than another, it 
is the spirit of caste, excluding anything like an interchange 
of affection between women and the higher spiritual powers. 
Yet this intercommunion of sentiment, this equality of feeling, 
so repugnant to the fundamental notions of the Hindoo 
religion, is made the cardinal hinge on which the whole poem 
turns. Kailyal, after going through a series of flirtations with 
Glendoveer, is transported along with that spirit to the bowers 
of bliss. This is about as incongruous as if Moore, with a view 
of illustrating the spirit of Christianity, had made the embrace 
of his angels * the means of spiritualizing the voluptuous 
creatures who had drawn them from their spheres, and sent 
the women back with them to carry on their carnal intercourse 
in heaven. 

If the loves of Kailyal and Glendoveer are little in accordance 
with the Hindoo religion, they are as much out of conformity with 
nature. The style in which they are depicted strongly remind 
us of what we occasionally hear at burlesques. This arose in 
some degree from the necessity of the situation, which forced 
him to represent love in its spiritual aspects, — a task for which 
he was utterly unfitted, as well as from a feeling that any- 
thing bordering on the sensuous divorced poetry from the 
austere ethical views it seems to have been a fundamental 
principle of the Lake school to inculcate. When, therefore, 
Southey brings his characters into such a position as to lead 
his readers to expect a burst of genuine passion, instead of the 
mixed play of feeling, the infinitely diversified blending of the 
ethereal with the sensuous which constitutes love, he is obliged 
to introduce some ridiculous machinery, some prosaic incident, 
some stage trick to fill up the foreground, which completely 
mars the effect of the picture, and awakens in his readers no 
other feelings but those of disappointment. No poet, perhaps, 
ever had a finer occasion for the display of his powers in this 
* " Loves of the Angels." 



THE LAKE POETS. 121 

branch of his art than Southey, when he lands the Glendoveer 
and Kailyal on Mount Mem. The maid was the fairest of 
the daughters of men. The spirit is described as ethereally 
accoutred with archangelic wings, in whose face youth smiled 
celestial, and in whose limbs was agility of strength combined 
with graceful curvature of beauty. Here an occasion pre- 
sented itself for eclipsing Byron and Moore on their own 
ground, by bringing out into bold relief the spiritual traits of 
this passion, of which they had given us too much of the 
mere material element. But how does Southey turn it to 
account ? Instead of marking in the two lovers the dawn of 
that passion whose growth is as ethereal as the first flashes of 
light which morning paints upon an Eastern sky, Southey 
makes Glendoveer first engage the affections of Kailyal by 
performing a series of aquatic feats in the lake spread out at 
her feet, at which she gazes with the same amazement as a 
village girl astounded at the somersaults of a tumbler at a fair. 
To put an end to this unsatisfactory state of things, Camdeo, a 
sort of Indian Cupid, is introduced, " riding," as the poet phrases 
it, "on his Lory." 

" O ye," he cried, " who have defied 
The Rajah, will ye mock my power ? 
* * * * * 

Shall ye alone, of all in story, 
Boast impenetrable hearts ? 
Hover here, my gentle Lory, 
Gently hover, while I see 
To whom has fate decreed the glory, 
To the Glendoveer or me. " 

While thus ejaculating, Glendoveer 

Moved slowly o'er the lake with gliding flight ; 

Anon, with sudden stroke and strong. 

la rapid course careering swept along ; 
Now shooting downward from his heavenly height, 
Plunged in the deep below ; 



122 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

* Then rising, soared again, 

And shook the sparkling waters off like rain. * 

At him thus engaged Camdeo let fly, but with no effect, for 
a man in a cold bath is not likely to be wounded by the fiery 
darts of love : — 

" Ah, wanton !" cried the Glendoveer, 
" Go, aim at idler hearts, 
Thy skill is baffled here ! 
A deeper love I bear that maid divine — 
A love that springeth from a higher will, 
A holier power than thine !" 

Then Camdeo tries his skill upon Kailyal with the same 
result : — 

' ' Ah, wanton ! " cried the Glendoveer, 
" No power hast thou for mischief here ! 

Choose thou some idle breast, 
For these are proof, by nobler thoughts possest. 
Go, to thy plains of Matra, go, 
And string again thy broken bow. "+ 

Now it turns out in the sequel that the Glendoveer and 
Kailyal were all along deeply in love with each other. This 
piece of purism is, therefore, as much out of character with 
nature and the drift of the poem, as it is in keeping with the 
burlesque imagery and silly language in which it is expressed. 

Southey's strength in these two epics lies in mere objective 
description. He materializes everything. His imitations are 
never flushed with the lines of the imaginative element. In 
painting even his best scenes of love or terror, he. copies the 
outward lineaments of his objects, without imparting any of the 
fire or Promethean force which kindles the life within. The 
world of impressions which other poets awaken by a startling 
metaphor or simile, as Spenser with his 

* " Curse of Kehama," — Mount Meru, b. x., s. 19, 20. 

t Ibid, b. x., s. 21, 23. 



THE LAKE POETS. 123 

Una's angel face, 
Which made a sunshine in a shady place ; 

or Milton's description of Satan, startling the two fair angels, 
by springing suddenly into the air like a sudden blaze from the 
ignition of a heap of gunpowder, we get a mere catalogue of 
the physical properties which the object of his description makes 
palpable to the senses. One of the best passages in " Kehama," 
which aims at spiritual embodiment, is that depicting the horror 
which Kailyal feels on encountering Arvalan : — 

That spectre fixed his eyes upon her full ; — 
The light which shone in their accursed orbs 

Was like a light from hell, 
And it grew deeper, kindling with the view. 
She could not turn her sight 
From that infernal gaze, which like a spell 
Bound her, and held her rooted to the ground, 

It palsied every power, 
Her limbs avail'd her not in that dread hour, 
There was no moving thence ; 
Thought, memory, sense, were gone : 
She heard not now the tiger's nearer cry, 
She thought not on her father now, 
Her cold heart's-blood ran back, 
Her hand lay senseless on the bough it clasp'd, 
Her feet were motionless ; 
Her fascinated eyes 
Like the stone eye-balls of a statue fix'd, 
Yet conscious of the sight that blasted them. * 

But who does not recognise here mere mechanical or routine 
description, the same effect weakened by iterated strokes, — the 
form rooted to the ground, the motionless feet, the limbs which 
would not be moved, the benumbed sense, or if anything more 
spiritual is attempted, as the light in Arvalan's eyes kindling 
with the view, and shining like light from hell, who does not 
perceive in the effort the weakest possible reflex of sublime pas- 

* "The Separation," b. v., s. 12. 



124 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

sages, which in the compass of a line and a half compress more 
thought than Southey could possibly convey in a volume ? The 
fact is there is little scope for mere objective description in de- 
lineating the higher phases of feeling or action, and when Southey 
ventures into this sphere, he has to replace the life-creating 
thought and consuming fire, which can alone give birth and 
impart animation to great conceptions, by rhetorical amplitude 
and spasmodic expression. Hence, in developing human 
incident, he is generally weak, prolix, and unaffective. His 
characters seem to move like certain pasteboard figures on 
wires, and to be jerked into their positions by no governing 
impulses which human nature can supply. But in the de- 
lineation of inanimate nature, in reproducing the material 
features of imposing scenery — in any combination, in fact, of 
external objects which does not require the exertion of a lofty 
imagination or an original fancy to impress upon the mind, 
there the poet is omnipotent 

Southey's talent for scene-painting — call it slapdash if you 
will, yet marvellous of its kind — is splendidly evinced in his 
description of the ancient sepulchres and submarine city of 
Baly, which makes us doubly regret that the rest of the poem 
should not have been executed in the same masterly spirit. For 
the material splendour of his scenery is out of all character with 
the mean figures and incidents in the foreground which stand 
out in wretched contrast with the gorgeous appendages they 
are supposed to enliven by their presence. The mountains of 
Cumberland fed his passion for waterfalls, and he always 
reproduces them in his pages with great force, as in 



Thalaba : 



Silent and calm the river rolled along, 

And at the verge arrived 
Of that fair garden, o'er a rocky bed 

Toward the mountain base, 
Still full and silent, held its even way. 
But farther as they went its deepening sound 



THE LAKE POETS. 125 

Louder and louder in the distance rose, 

As if it forced its stream, 
Struggling through crags along a narrow pass. 
And lo ! where raving o'er a hollow course 

The ever-flowing flood 
Foams in a thousand whirlpools ; there adown 

The perforated rock, 
Plunge the whole waters ; so precipitous, 

So fathomless a fall, 
That their earth-shaking roar came deaden'd up 

Like subterranean thunders. * 

The source of the Ganges in " Kehama" could not be passed 
by without a similar effort, though the researches of Captain 
Speke, which Southey seems to have anticipated, have some- 
what dimmed the merit of the discovery : — 

None hath seen its secret fountain ; 

But on the top of Meru mountain, 

Which rises o'er the hills of earth, 
In light and clouds it hath its mortal birth. 

Earth seems that pinnacle to rear 

Sublime above this worldly sphere — 

Its cradle, and its altar, and its throne ; 

And there the new-born river lies 

Outspread beneath its native skies, . 

As if it there would love to dwell 

Alone and unapproachable. 

Soon flowing forward and resign'd 

To the will of the Creating Mind, 

It springs at once, with sudden leap, 

Down from the immeasurable steep. 
From rock to rock, with shivering force rebounding, 

The mighty cataract rushes — heaven arounding, 
Like thunder, with the incessant roar resounding, 

And Meru's summit shaking with the sound. 
Wide spreads the snowy foam — the sparkling spray 

Dances aloft ; and ever there at morning 
The earliest sunbeams haste to wing their way, 

With rainbow-wreaths the holy stream adorning. 

* " Thalaba," b. vii., s. 6. 



126 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

And duly the adoring moon at night 

Sheds her white glory there, 

And in the watery air 
Suspends her halo-crowns of silver light. * 

The immolation of Arvalan's wives is also vividly depictured, 
and the contrast between the wild tumult and bacchanalian 
uproar of the Juggernaut procession and the placid appearance 
of nature, well brought out : — 

O silent Night, how have they startled thee 

With the brazen trumpet's blare ! 
And thou, O moon, whose quiet light serene 
Filleth wide heaven, and bathing hill and wood, 
Spreads o'er the peaceful valley like a flood, 
How have they dimm'd thee with the torches' glare, 
Which round yon moving pageant flame and flare, 
As the wild rout, with deafening song and shout, 

Fling their long flashes out, 
That, like infernal lightnings, fire the air.t 

Towards the close of his poem, Southey transports us to the 
world's end, where souls are described, in a manner which 
too painfully reminds us of Dante, waiting upon the distant 
shore, to be transported to the presence of Yamen, the great 
judge seated upon the confines of hell. Among these are 
wailing infants, young widows sacrificed at their husbands' 
funereal piles, and other "victims of offences not their own," 
whose 

Innocent souls ! thus set so early free 
From sin and sorrow and mortality, 
Their spotless spirits all- creating love 
Received into its universal breast. 
Yon blue serene above 
Was their domain ; clouds pillowed them to rest ; 



Curse of Kehama," — Mount Meru, Book x., s. 3. 
+ Ibid. Jaga-Naut - , Book xiv., s. 4. 



THE LAKE POETS. 127 

The elements on them like nurses tended, 
And with their growth ethereal substance blended. 
Less pure than these is that strange Indian bird, 
Who never dips in earthly streams her bill, 
But, when the sound of coming showers is heard, 
Looks up, and from the clouds receives her fill. 
Less pure the footless fowl of Heaven, that never 
Rest upon earth, but on the wing for ever 
Hovering o'er flowers, their fragrant food inhale, 
Drink the descending dew upon its way, 
And sleep aloft while floating on the gale. * 

But all these beauties only refer to material description. 
Nor are there any passages purely spiritual in the whole poem, 
except the well-known lines, 

" They sin who tell us Love can die," 

which gleams like a fluted pillar of light upon the cloudy 
atmosphere by which they are surrounded. I do not, there- 
fore, think the " Curse of Kehama," which most of Southey's 
admirers regard as his chef-d'oeuvre^ entitled to rank very 
high as an epic. The performance is unequal, the inci- 
dents unnatural and grotesque, the characters too monkish 
for Oriental fiction, and the beauties nearly all appertain to 
an inferior department of art, that of the lower order of 
imitation. 

In " Thalaba," the beauties do not belong to a higher class 
than those in " Kehama," but the poem is free from much of 
the slipshod writing which disfigures the Indian poem. The 
absence of rhyme puts the poet on his mettle to express his 
conceptions in the most forcible manner. His commonplaces 
are never drest up in that sing-song which reminds us of panto- 
mimes and theatrical burlesques, but are always couched in 
sonorous language. The plot is also better constructed. In 
the " Curse of Kehama," we frequently lose sight of the leading, 
in the subordinate, characters of the poem ; but in the Arabian 

* "Curse of Kehama," — The World's End, Book xxi., s. 6. 



128 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

story, amid all the windings of the plot and pantomimic change 
of scenery, Thalaba is ever present, as the central figure to 
which all the incidents of the piece relates. The attachment 
between Thalaba and Oneiza is also more naturally developed 
than that between the Glendoveer and Kailyal, which begins in 
canting hypocrisy, and ends in cloudy mysticism. Though the 
poet, in the Cottage of Moath, in the gardens of Aloadin, and 
in the sepulchre, threw away, as is his wont, three grand 
occasions for pourtraying earthly love in the principal stages 
of its existence — viz., its birth, its possession of the object, 
and the death-like eclipse which steeps the heart in the 
shadows of the grave when that object is withdrawn, — still he 
gives his reader just enough to make him understand that 
Thalaba and Oneiza each pine for the other, as that something 
without which life cannot be realized : 

"Thee first, thee last, thee midst, thee without end." 

It is for these reasons that, as a work of art, I place 
" Thalaba," as did Shelley and Southey himself, above all his 
other epics. 

Whatever this poet saw he could group with multiform com- 
binations into definite pictures, as pleasing and diversified as 
ever glowed in the imaginations of Poussin or Lorraine ; but 
whatever was removed from the sphere of actuality was evidently 
above his reach. Where materialities end, there Southey's 
difficulties begin. Hence his magicians and his spirits, 
whether of the good or bad order, so far as their features are 
not limned from the models of Spenser, are wretched crea- 
tions. He gets on as miserably in the lofty regions of Swerga, 
as in the abyssmal vaults of Domdaniel. But in " Thalaba/' 
most of the incidents take place on the earth. We are only 
transplanted, on one or two of these occasions, beneath the 
roots of the ocean, to see the plots concocted which are to 
circumvent Thalaba among the wildest scenery that ever 
dazzled the imagination of man. The resemblance of the 



LAKE POETS. 129 



garden of Aloadin, in its general outline, to the opening scene 
in " Rasselas," is forgotten in the following picture : — 

It was broad moonlight, and obscure or lost 
The garden beauties lay, 
But the great boundary rose, distinctly mark'd. 
These were no little hills, 
No sloping uplands lifting to the sun 
Their vineyards, with fresh verdure, and the shade 
Of ancient woods, courting the loiterer 
To win the easy ascent : stone mountains these. 
Desolate rock on rock, 
The burthens of the earth, 
Whose snowy summits met the morning beam, 
When night was in the vale, whose feet were fix'd 
In the world's foundations. Thalaba beheld 
The heights precipitous, 
Impending crags, rocks unascendible, 
And summits that had tired the eagle's wing. * 

But the poet is most at home in reproducing the enchantments 
of his own Cumberland scenery : — 

In mazy windings o'er the vale 

A thousand streamlets stray'd, 

And in their endless course 

Had intersected deep the stony soil, 

With labyrinthine channels islanding 

A thousand rocks, which seem'd 
Amid the multitudinous waters there 
Like clouds that freckle o'er the summer sky, 
The blue ethereal ocean circling each, 
And insulating all.f 

The following little piece might suit an Academician for his 
next picture, though he could not give us the charming combi- 
nation of liquid sounds which make the flowing waters splash 
music in our ears : — 



Book vii., s. 4. t Book vi., s. 10. 



1 30 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

The moonlight lay upon the rocks ; 
Their crags were visible, 
The shade of jutting cliffs, 
And where broad lichens whiten'd some smooth spot, 
And where the ivy hung 
Its flowing tresses down. 
A little way within the cave 
The moonlight fell, glossing the sable tide 
That gush'd tumultuous out. * 

In the delight which Thalaba experienced in the gardens 
of Aloadin, it would be hard to say which sense was most 
gratified, it we leave touch out of the question. First, the 
sight — 

Thalaba stood mute, 
And passively received 
The mingled joy which flowed on every sense. 
Where'er his eye could reach 
Fair structures, rainbow-hued, arose ; 
And rich pavilions through the opening woods 
Gleam'd from their waving curtains sunny gold ; 
And winding through the verdant vale, 
Went streams of liquid light ; 
And fluted cypresses rear'd up 
Their living obelisks ; 
And broad-leaved plane-trees in long colonnades 

O'er-arched delightful walks, 
Where round their trunks the thousand -tendrill'd vine 
Wound up and hung the boughs with greener wreaths, 

And clusters not their own. 
.... Beside him teems the earth 
With tulips, like the ruddy evening streak'd ; 
And here the lily hangs her head of snow ; 
And here amid her sable cup 
Shines the red-eye spot, like one brightest star, 
The solitary twinkler of the night ; 
And here the rose expands 
Her paradise of leaves.f 

* Book v., s. 22. t Book vi., s. 20. 



LAKE POETS. 131 



Then the ear- 



Far music and the distance-mellow' d song 
From bowers of merriment ; 
The waterfall remote ; 
The murmuring of the leafy groves ; 
The single nightingale 
Perch'd in the rosier by, so richly toned, 
That never from that most melodious bird, 
Singing a love-song to his brooding mate, 
Did Thracian shepherd by the grave 
Of Orpheus hear a sweeter melody, 
Though there the spirit of the sepulchre 
All his own power infuse, to swell 
The incense that he loves.* 

And afterwards the smell — 

And oh ! what odours the voluptuous vale 
Scatters from jasmine bowers, 
From yon rose wilderness, 
From cluster'd henna and from orange groves, 

That with sweet perfume fill the breeze. 
* * * * * 

Such odours flow'd upon the world, 

When at Mohammed's nuptials, word 

Went forth in Heaven, to roll 

The everlasting gates of Paradise 

Back on their living hinges, that its gales 

Might visit all below ; the general bliss 

Thrill'd every bosom, and the family 

Of man, for once, partook one common joy. + 

To this paradise, whose beauties are distinctly labelled and 
catalogued under three appropriate heads, Thalaba is admitted 
in the usual manner through gates which spontaneously open 
at the sound of a horn suspended, like our modern rustic 
villa bells, at the entrance. But these gates close in a manner 
which makes the reader imagine he hears the sound reverbera- 

* Book vi., s. 21. + Book vi., s. 23. 



1 32 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

ting behind him, and that he has got in, as well as Thalaba 
himself : — 

Like a long thunder-peal, 
From rock to rock rebounding rung the blast, 
The gates of iron, by no human arm 
Unfolded, turning on their hinges slow, 

Disclosed the passage of the rock. 

He entered, and the iron gates fell to, 

And with a clap like thunder closed him in. * 

The cave of the giant Zohak, with the two serpents growing out 
of his shoulders, which supplied Macaulay with his apt illus- - 
tration of the position of England with respect to the Irish 
and Scotch churches, whoever reads is not likely to forget. 
Indeed, the whole of the fifth and sixth books, being written 
in the same graphic style, will make " Thalaba ' ; an acceptable 
book, when the " Curse of Kehama " is remembered with 
indifference, and " Madoc " or " Roderic " are forgotten. 

But placing "Thalaba" as high as its splendid imagery and 
forcible diction will warrant, few of its beauties are of an ideal 
character. They strike the senses, but seldom reach the heart. 
No fiction can excite our emotions without verisimilitude. 
In " Thalaba," however, there is hardly a line that bears any 
likeness to nature. Contrast, with this epic, the unpretending 
tale of " Paraguay," the only poem in which Southey kindles 
genuine pathos. Here the incidents, which are of the simplest 
kind, the poet details in the simplest manner, but with traits of 
character so life-like, and with scenic colouring so real, that we 
feel as keen a sympathy for the Indian family, as if we had been 
acquainted with the group in their prairie solitude, and saw them 
wither like pent-up plants in the atmosphere of refinement. 
But in "Thalaba" the style is as gorgeous as the incidents 
are grand and complex. Yet we follow the hero through his 
course with the same unconcern as if he belonged to another 
sphere ; while in the simpler story, the decline of Mooma and 

* Book vi., s. 16. 



LAKE POETS. 133 



the visions, which bring down heaven to the bedside of Yeruti, 
impress the mind with all the appearance of truth. We cannot 
get it out of our head for a moment that the more pretentious 
effusion is only a wild freak of the imagination. The most 
credulous, therefore, remain unaffected by the greatest perils of 
Thalaba; while the most callous find it difficult to restrain 
their emotion over the three graves dug by civilization for the 
denizens of the wilderness. The little poem is spiritual, and 
therefore mighty; but the great poem is so material that it 
becomes immaterial. 

I do not know that the scenic beauties of" Thalaba," great as 
they are, or the construction of the plot, scientific or original as 
I must allow it to be, ought to go farther, were it not for his 
ballads, and his metrical tales, than to place Southey at the 
head of the fourth-class poets. Perfection of scene-painting, 
when accompanied with imperfect delineation of character, is, 
after all, not a very high accomplishment ; and all Southey's 
personages had neither the general attributes of a class, nor the 
peculiar features of an individual. They are either too angelic 
or too demoniacal for flesh and blood in this world of ours, 
which generally blends great passions with great virtues, and 
wherein the best men never appear without some alloy of vice, 
or the worst, without some gleams of their ethereal nature 
breaking through the darkness of their crimes. It is this 
composite character, this halting to indulge two conflicting 
principles, this following the worse, while approving of the better 
course, which makes human character so interesting in the hands 
of the idealist, but which Southey, altogether, has lost sight 
of in his epics. Kailyal and Oneiga, as well as Thalaba and 
the Glendoveer, are only fit company for seraphs; Kehama, 
Arvalan, and Aloadin are only fit company for fiends. Madoc 
is an angel, David a butchering savage, and Roderic, after his 
overthrow, a faultless hermit. Natural scenery we have in all 
its luscious varieties, of lake, mountain, dell, pine forest, myriad- 
tongued ocean, bold headland, gushing fountain, or sweeping 



134 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

river, either reflecting or keeping each other in countenance 
with their quiet harmonies of light, form, and colour ; but we 
seek in vain for the inhabitants of earth, among the angelic 
or haggard creatures whom the poet has summoned to people 
it from other spheres. But in his ballads we get among 
genuine men and women. The simplicity of the treatment is 
quite in keeping with that of the subject. Our curiosity is 
aroused at the commencement, and is kept alive to the end. 
They combine the perfection of the ballad style, that is, quiet 
irony intermingled with charming naivete, stirring incident, 
and deep pathos. Having small canvas for his picture, 
Sou they at once seizes, upon the salient features of the subject, 
and discards the fatal prolixity which mars most of his heavier pro- 
ductions. The "Maid of the Inn," the " Well of St. Keyne," the 
"Battle of Blenheim," the "Inchcape Rock," place Southey at 
the head of the ballad, while his "Madoc" and his "Roderic" 
place him very nearly at the tail of the epic poets of his country. 
Southey is the only artist we know whose merits may be said to 
vary in inverse proportion to the length of his performances. 
His " Joan of Arc" and " Thalaba" are the shortest and best of 
his epics. His "Tale of Paraguay" is shorter and better than 
either. But his ballads, which are shorter still, are the best 
of all. 

The characteristics of the Lake School may be summed up in a 
very few words. They each took the love of nature and domes- 
ticity as imaged in Thomson and Cowper's natural style, as 
their basis. Upon this Wordsworth grafted a large amount of 
ideality, the habit of investing the simplest objects with a feel- 
ing of the infinite, and of analyzing with metaphysical subtilty 
the spiritual intercommunion between the human mind and the 
external universe. But Southey applied the Cowperian style to 
the production of historical poems, in which nothing further 
was sought than a series of dramatic pictures, with a vivid 
delineation of material nature as a background, except that in 
his oriental poems, Cowper is dismissed for Dr. Sayer. We are, 



LAKE POETS. 135 



however, in the bulk of Southey's pieces, never taken out of the 
actual world. The spiritualities sustaining, and giving, in fact, 
embodiment to external phenomena are never made apparent. 
Our attention is exclusively engrossed by the material linea- 
ments of pictures selected, for the most part, from the com- 
monest phases of humanity. This is the reason why people 
have all along, perhaps unconsciously to themselves, placed 
the later laureate very high up in the second division of poets, 
and his predecessor very low down in the third. I have no 
wish to disturb that arrangement, unless it be to advance 
Southey a grade or two in the list, and to rescue his oriental 
epics from that complete oblivion which appears to be fast 
settling over them. Coleridge stands midway between his 
two neighbours. In his earlier pieces he sought to unite the 
rustic graces of Cowper with the elegiac tenderness of Collins ; 
in his later, with the mysticism of German metaphysics. We 
get, therefore, a large amount of ideality in his pieces. The 
material only serves to illustrate the spiritual, and never, as in 
Southey, to conceal it. We are constantly in his poetry hover- 
ing between two worlds. But his indolence, his desultory studies, 
his fluctuating resolves, his purposeless efforts, his disjointed 
pursuits and intemperate habits of conversationalizing, hindered 
him from carrying these advantages so far as to place his name 
even within the same division as Wordsworth. 



136 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 

THE Classical School seems to have adopted satire as its 
peculiar province. Hudibras is the only satirical poet 
who did not wield his lash in the English heroic couplet. All 
the other leading satirists of our language, Donne, Pope, 
Dry den, Churchill, Johnson, employed the pentameter. As 
the follies of mankind are not very obtrusive in the country, as 
the stage on which they love to display their eccentricities is 
reserved for large towns, it almost follows as a matter of course 
that the language should be as artificial as the subjects on which 
it is employed. It would ill become the Muse, on abandoning 
the upland or the dell for the Mall or the Row, if she did not 
exchange her rustic dress for the meretricious ornaments of 
fashionable life. As the Roman poets, even while cultivating their 
farms, never lashed the vices of the Suburra except in heroics, 
the English poets thought they could not do less. But our 
English satirists have drawn the connection between conven- 
tional themes and classical treatment closer than was necessary, 
by making their poems mere paraphrases of Roman satires. 
The example which Pope set in adopting Horace as his model, 
was followed by Johnson, who paraphrased Juvenal, and by 
GirTord, who imitated Perseus. 

It appears that towards the close of last century, a coterie 
of literary aspirants happened to domesticate themselves at 






I 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 137 



Florence. Mrs. Thrale, the brewer's widow, who betook herself 
thither after losing caste in England by her marriage with Piozzi, 
opened her salons for their reception. There, used to congregate 
Mr. Merry, a son of a country magistrate, who had abandoned 
the bar for the Muses j Mrs. Robinson, the seductive actress, 
who had in turn captivated the heart of the Prince Regent and 
Charles Fox ; Mrs. Cowley, who was anxious to reinvigorate 
the waning empire of beauty by an extraordinary display of senti- 
ment ; and Mr. Parsons, who regarded poetic rapture in woman 
as a genuine proof of voluptuous sensibility. These people, 
whom congenial tastes brought together, soon found themselves 
engaged in addressing amatory poetry to each other. They 
imagined themselves like the swains and shepherdesses of 
Fontenelle, to unite in their persons the ingenuous transports 
of rustic life with the exquisite tastes of polished society. Their 
effusions were circulated under feigned names, with a view to 
create, while appearing to elude, public inquiry. Merry signed 
himself Delia Crusca ; Mrs. Robinson, Julia and Laura Maria ; 
Mrs. Piozzi, Anna Matilda ; Parsons, Carlos. It was at Mrs. 
Piozzi's reunions that Merry recited, with the gesticulations of 
Statius, to the delight of a languishing auditory, his great poem, 
" The Wreath of Liberty," — a philosophical rhapsody in praise 
of the French Revolution, which was to transmit his name to 
future generations. From the opening lines it would appear that 
Merry was only an earlier edition of "Satan" Montgomery : — 

Genius or muse, whoe'er thou art, whose thrill 
Exalts the fancy or inflames the will ; 
Bids on the heart sublime sensation roll, 
And wakes ecstatic fervour in the soul. 

But the tinsel was just of that kind to waken enthusiasm in 
the hearts of his female admirers, and the celestial Robinson, 
fresh from the revels of Drury Lane, could thus address her 
Delia Crusca : 

When amidst ethereal fire 
Thou strik'st thy Delia Cruscan lyre, 



138 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Round to catch the heavenly song, 
Myriads of wondering seraphs throng. 

And again, — 

O thou, to whom superior worth allied, 
Thy country's honour and thy Muse's pride, 
Thy genius flows in every classic line, 
And Nature dictates everything that's thine. 

Merry seems to have been prodigiously gratified with this 
incense from the altar of beauty, and implored the fair one to 

Let the streaming lightnings fly 
In liquid peril from her eye : 

But he does not appear to have been of that mood which his 
name would indicate, for we find him presently exclaiming — 

Conjure up demons from the main, 
Storm upon storm indignant heap, 
Bid ocean howl and nature weep, 
Till the Creator blush to see 
How horrible His world can be ! 
While I will glory to blaspheme, 
And make the joys of hell my theme : 

simply because Mrs. Robinson would not open her eyes. 
With Anna Matilda, who was equally profuse in his praise, he 
appears to have got on a little better, though her inexorable 
correctness made him express his griefs so awkwardly that 
gaping fiends might think he was triumphing over her virtue : — • 

Yes, I will prove that I deserve my fate, 
Was born for anguish, and was formed for hate, 
With such transcend^* woe will breathe my sigh, 
That envying fiends mil think it ecstasy. 

To which the fair Matilda replied, — 

Ne'er shalt thou know to sigh, 
Nor on a soft idea die, 
Ne'er on a recollection grasp 
Thy arms 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 139 

The following lines of Merry were always thought by his fair 
admirers to eclipse Pope : — 

From a young grove's shade, 
Where infant boughs but mock the expecting glade, 
Sweet sounds stole forth upborne upon the gale, 
Pressed through the air and broke upon the vale, 
Then silent walked the breezes of the plain, 
Or soared aloft and seized the hovering strain. 

It will be readily imagined that the little English colony at 
Florence was too small a theatre for the display of genius so 
startling, and a cargo of the poetry was shipped to London, where 
a clique of literary coxcombs, headed by Este, had just started 
a periodical called " The World. " The new wares were just 
fitted for the vehicle, ready to launch them into notice. Every 
week there appeared in its columns, with a short eulogistic 
preface, some nonsense, which Merry, the Anacreon of the 
party, had addressed to Sappho (Mrs. Robinson), or some 
strain which Greathead, who assumed the part of Horace, 
poured into the heart of his Delia (Mrs. Cowley). With the 
rapidity of flame among dry rushes, the epidemic spread not 
less among editors, anxious to compete with Este for the 
honour of introducing this stuff to the public, than among the 
fat dowagers and sickly sentimentalists, eager to prolong the 
follies of their youth by enacting the scenes of Mrs. Piozzi's 
reunions over again. Mr. Bell, of the " Oracle," and Urban, 
of the "Gentleman's Magazine," besides the "Gazetteer," 
opened their pages to the new contributors. The strains from 
Florence were re-echoed in still more foolish ditties by the 
Julias, the Jerninghams, the Edwins, and Tophams of London. 
Reuben could thus waft his vows to the stout shepherdess in 
the " Oracle," who signed herself Anna Matilda : — 

To thee a stranger dares address his theme, 

To thee, proud mistress of Apollo's lyre, 
One ray emitted from thy golden gleam, 

Prompted by love, would set the world on fire. 



140 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

To which the stout shepherdess replied, — 

This resuscitating praise 
Breathes life upon my dying days ; 
But, bard polite, how hard the task, 
"Which with such elegance you ask ! 

Bell, who made himself a vehicle for this sort of interchange, 
roundly declared, in his pompous introductory preludes, that 
much of Greathead's poetry was equal to Pindar's, while he 
was certain that a sonnet of Mrs. Robinson's, addressed to the 
Nightingale, could not be touched by Milton. Dr. Tasker, a 
gentleman who should have known better, thus reinforced the 
discriminating criticism of Bell : — 

In Ancient Greece two glorious forms were seen, 

Wisdom's stern goddess and Love's smiling queen, 

Pallas presided over arms and arts, 

And Venus over gentle virgins' hearts ; 

But now both powers in one fair form combine, 

And in famed Robinson united shine. 

The result of this systematic fpufnng was, that Harris, manager 
of Covent Garden, was induced to accept a tragedy of Merry's, 
called "Lorenzo," which actually made its author, for a 
few brief nights, the hero of the town. Merry came over to 
London, and announced himself to his followers by a sonnet. 
He grew jealous of Greathead's advances with the fair contribu- 
tors to the " Oracle," and exchanged still more furious vows 
with Anna Matilda. The fever at last grew to a frenzy. Even 
the swains and sempstresses of the provinces caught the in- 
fection, till every periodical in the country resounded with 
nonsense and Delia Crusca. 

It was to brush this swarm of fools away that Gifford seems 
to have been sent into the world ; for I do not know that he 
did anything else worthy of special regard. But the glory of 
restoring Milton and Pope to the places of which they had 
been dispossessed by Merry and Topham, appears to have sur- 
rounded him with a factitious halo out of all proportion to his 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 141 

real merits. The extravagant praises of Byron, who regarded 
him as a satirist second to none in our literature, have also placed 
him upon a pedestal to which his works give him no claim. 
For Gifford was by no means an original genius, even in 
the poor sense of casting the conceptions of others into the 
crucible of a fiery imagination, to startle the reader with old 
thoughts under new combinations. His performances are 
simply a very good reflex of the favourite authors, in the study 
of whom he sauntered away his early manhood under the 
beeches of Eaton Hall. He is tender as well as epigrammatic ; 
but neither his gushes of passion, nor sallies of wit, are ever so 
strong as to discard conventional language, and clothe themselves 
in the imagery of nature. His lines on " Anna," and those ad- 
dressed to a "Tuft of Early Violets," are mere echoes — the one 
from Collins, the other from Prior — of feelings and phrases with 
which these two poets attempted to ally heartfelt sentiment 
with classical diction. Even in the " Maeviad," when he rushes 
into sentimentality, he succeeds hardly better than Prior might 
have done with similar materials : — 

How oft, O Dart ! what time the faithful pair 
Walked forth, the fragrant hour of eve to share, 
On thy romantic banks have my wild strains 
(Not yet forgot amidst my native plains), 
While thou hast sweetly gurgled down the vale, 
Fill'd up the pause of love's delightful tale ; 
While ever as she read, the conscious maid, 
By faltering voice and downcast look betrayed, 
Would blushing on her lover's neck recline, 
And with her finger point the tenderest line.* 

That Byron could regard such language as this with rapture, 
can only be accounted for by his reckless adulation of Pope. 

Gifford was disqualified by habit, as well as by nature, from 
the role of a gieat satirist, who, while having a heart keenly 
sensitive to wrong, must have sufficient independence to hurl 
at the perpetrators of it, the lightnings of his indignation. 

* See " Maeviad," pp. 194, 202. 



142 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Every chord of his heart must vibrate in unison with nature. 
Convention, and the victims of its artificial restraints, must 
arouse in him feelings akin to those felt by the knight-errants 
of old, when they beheld virtue suffering in the gripe of some 
savage monster of the woods, and rushed forward to imperil 
their heart's blood in its release. But all these were qualities 
which Gifford did not only want, but of which he had the very 
opposite. He entertained little respect for anything in the world 
but the artificial creations of rank and fashion. An author who 
had never been at either of the Universities, or who did not live 
in the vicinity of May Fair, could expect little mercy from Gifford, 
'except, indeed, he had some peculiar claims upon his party. 
The writer who took his instructions from Pitt, as to the tenor 
of his next paper in the Quarterly, or of his next contribution 
to the Anti-Jacobin, who threw his shield over the worst 
errors of Lord Liverpool, or the wildest vagaries of Castlereagh, 
was not the man to array himself in the glittering armour of 
satire, and hew down in song the complicated blunders, vices, 
and follies he had defended in other spheres. To break a 
butterfly on a wheel, to expose a poetaster or some literary 
charlatan, to scalp a youthful genius of liberal tendencies who 
evinced talents which might, under proper encouragement, 
eclipse his own, — these were the things in which he shone, 
this constituted the petty sphere of his vocation. 

His translations of Juvenal and Perseus, by which he is most 
known, after his " Baviad" and " Maeviad," are tame and insipid 
renderings of the originals, except where a jest or a repartee 
has to be given with force and propriety. The verse falls flat 
on the ear after the dashing couplets of Dryden. What he 
gains in correctness, he loses in force. To anglicise Juvenal 
required every quality which Gifford lacked most, — a mind 
replete with great fire and energy, a thorough disgust with the 
vices of the great, and a hearty sympathy with every kind of 
undeserved oppression. With Perseus he was far more at home. 
For the stoical poet resembled Gifford in his seeming indiffer- 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 143 

ence to the mass of suffering which political misgovernment 
threw in his path, and in confining his satire to those obliquities 
whose exposure would do harm neither to his patrons nor himself. 
When, therefore, he applied his lash to the Delia Cruscans, 
Gifford was in his element. Their offences were of that ridiculous 
character that only could be laughed out of fashion by quiet 
irony and by that airy banter of which Gifford was perfect master. 
Had the delinquents been of a graver sort, — had they been 
eccentric madmen like Charles of Sweden, or social monsters 
like Chatier, — Gifford's glittering weapon would have fared as ill 
in dealing with the subject as a fencing rapier in a broad-sword 
skirmish. When Byron called on the satirist to attack gigantic 
vice in high places, and make the 

Guilty glare through future time, 
Eternal beacons of consummate crime, * 

he entirely miscalculated Gifford's powers. For it is one thing 

to demolish a school of wretched poetasters, and another to 

make 

Bad men better, or at least ashamed. + 

And when Gifford tried his hand at the latter, in his epistle to 
Wolcott, he resembled a child lifting a club he was unable to 
wield, and earned from his victim a sound horsewhipping. He 
mistook a string of vituperative abuse for those brilliant touches 
of satire which makes the spirituality of our common nature act 
as a foil to project into deeper blackness of guilt those vices 
which in the lowest or loftiest criminals overshadow its splen- 
dour. Gifford should have remembered that " monster of turpi- 
tude," "reptile gorged with bile/' "ruffian," and other kindred 
terms, no more constituted satire than " crashing torrents," 
" petrifying suns," " hoar hills," and " glassy brooks " constituted 
pastoral poetry. 

Perseus, on account of the limited range of his sympathies, 

* "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." 
+ Ibid. 



144 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

as well as his want of force, is confessedly far below Juvenal ; 
but Gifford had even a narrower range of mind than Perseus, 
though he seems to have been possessed of a tenderness to 
which the Roman stoic could lay no claim. He stands there- 
fore in a more inferior relation to Dry den or Churchill than 
Perseus does to the great master of Roman satire ; for Perseus, 
with all his deficiencies, was still original, whereas Gifford, 
like Pope and Johnson, cast the framework of his design in the 
mouldings of others. Yet even here he suffers by comparison, 
for Johnson and Pope had somewhat of the fire, the vigour, and 
the caustic irony of their masters. But in each of these quali- 
ties Perseus is singularly deficient, and his imitators are far more 
deficient than Perseus. The state of wretched dependence in 
which Gifford had been reared, his social thraldom in the Bel- 
grave family, his disposition to wear the livery and perform the 
meanest offices of his party for daily bread, must have mate- 
rially interfered with the development of any talents for satire, 
1 in the broad and unfettered arena upon which alone they can be 
cultivated with success. I cannot, then, do otherwise than place 
Gifford with Johnson among the second-class satirists; but 
while placing the sturdy Johnson among the first group in that 
class, I feel reluctantly compelled to consign Gifford, notwith- 
standing his Court buckles and Corinthian polish, to the last. 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 145 



THERE is no poet of the nineteenth century whom criticism 
should delight to honour more than Rogers : a gentle- 
man of blameless manners, of tender feelings, a princely Maecenas 
of letters, a virtuoso of rare taste — possessing a keen sympathy 
with every institution calculated to promote the well-being of 
his fellow-creatures. But, I fear, the amiability of the man had 
largely to do with his defects as a poet. He could not feel, 
and, therefore, could not awaken, passion in others. He was 
deficient in that nervous sensibility, which, however morose it 
may make its victim occasionally appear, is a necessary ingre- 
dient in the production of any great work of art. Nor was he 
possessed of that frowning imagination which delights in the 
contemplation of the grand and the terrible, and which in so 
delighting withdraws its possessor from the sunny gaieties of the 
outer world. Rogers wanted force of nature and persistency of 
will. He was too weak and languid to exercise that concen- 
trative energy which is required in the production of a great 
poem. He lived too constantly in the creations of others to 
flourish very much in his own. Hence he struck out no new 
line for himself. His " Ode to Superstition " is only a weak 
reflex of Gray ; his short piece on Loch Long is an imitation of 
Wordsworth. In his "Epistle on Taste," in his "Human 
Life," and " Pleasures of Memory," he follows Goldsmith ; but 
he follows him with such success, that in some respects he may 
be said to have equalled his master. He, however, lacks his 
depth of feeling, and that vigour which occasionally rises into 

10 



146 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

sublimity. The rich banker had never competed with a clown, 
for the pennies of a gaping crowd, by standing upon his head ; 
he had never played a flageolet at a cottage door for a night's 
lodgings ; he had never looked down from the top of the Alps 
with blistered feet, and with such ravenous reflection as hungry 
solitude is calculated to inspire. His experience, therefore, of 
human suffering was as limited as his acquaintance with the 
grand and more abrupt features of Nature ; and what he could 
not realize perfectly to himself, he failed to impress upon others. 
It is very pleasant to be at the head of a large financial estab- 
lishment ; to have an unlimited power of drawing cheques upon 
the house ; to never ride abroad except in luxurious carriages, 
with india-rubber springs ; to feel no want without having it 
promptly supplied; but the atmosphere of beneficent indul- 
gence is not that in which Genius moults her strongest 
pinions; and the genius of Rogers was not of such high 
character as to neutralize, but rather to be impaired by, the 
disadvantages of his position. Goldsmith could paint from 
actual experience, familiar as he was with every phase of 
existence, while Rogers contemplated the most exciting scenes 
of life, tapestried as in a loom, and then only from the wrong 
side of the arras. 

It has appeared a marvel to some that Rogers, having pro- 
duced the " Pleasures of Memory " at the outset of his career, 
did not produce something greater to fulfil the rich promise he 
thus gave of a splendid maturity. But, I think, the wonder ought 
to be, not that he failed to produce anything greater, but that he 
ever produced anything so good, In the best of his descriptions 
he never presents anything in a new light ; he never scales the 
heights of genuine sublimity ; he never wounds the soul with 
deep emotions of pity, or intoxicates it with the delights of 
love. In his episode of "Julia and Florio," as in his stories of 
" Jacqueline " and " Columbus," he had a wide field for the con- 
struction of plot and the delineation of individual character, but he 
can hardly be said to attempt the one, as he certainly makes a 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 147 

very faint exhibition of the other. He never startles his reader 
with any bold reflections. He leaves life, with its mysteries, its 
problems, and its perplexing enigmas, just where he found it. 
The whole of his talent consists in recalling, by vivid touches, 
all those sunnier scenes of existence in which the heart is most 
interested, and over which Fancy loves most to brood. Sum- 
moned by his magic pencil, the most charming recollections of 
the poet troop in palpable array before us, and the mind recurs 
to them as to a series of pictures interwoven with its own 
sensations, the fidelity of which has all the stamp of truth. 
But this talent was not capable of much expansion or variation, 
Its range was limited; it could not be said to grow. And 
hence Rogers' genius was like the acacia, which bears a pro- 
fusion of blossom but no fruit. 

In the " Pleasures of Memory " Rogers was singularly happy 
in the choice of a subject which just suited the range of his 
powers ; and it cannot be denied that, with the exception of the 
wretched episode in the second part, his treatment of it would 
have done justice to an artist of even greater abilities. To a 
comprehensive grasp of the subject, he unites skilful delineation 
of parts and elaborate finish of the minuter points of detail 
more perfectly than has been accomplished in any other poem 
of similar compass. He not only invests these recollections 
with the freshest colours, which time has obscured, but which 
fancy has endeared to most of us ; but he selects from a wide 
range of extraneous objects those scenes illustrative of his 
subject which are most calculated to awaken the purest sympa- 
thies of our nature. Whether he pourtrays the dove flying 
homeward to the famished garrison, with its message of deliver- 
ance tied under its wing, only to be devoured by those to 
whom it brings unexpected tidings of relief; or the nun in her 
convent gloom recalling the dearest blandishments of the world 
she has forsworn; or the Swiss peasant journeying over the 
Alps, with the storm-cloud under his feet and the prattle of his 
babes haunting his ear across the roar of the waterfall ; — the 



148 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

sketch is drawn with a simplicity and a natural truthfulness 
which must always enchant the mind : — 

The beauteous maid, who bids the world adieu, 
Oft of that world will snatch a fond review ; 
Oft at the shrine neglect her beads, to trace 
Some social scene, some dear, familiar face : 
And ere, with iron tongue, the vesper bell 
Bursts thro' the cypress walk, the convent cell, 
Oft will her warm and wayward heart revive, 
To love and joy still tremblingly alive ; 
The whispered vow, the chaste caress prolong, 
Weave the light dance, and swell the choral song ; 
With rapt ear drink the enchanting serenade, 
And, as it melts along the moonlight glade, 
To each soft note returns as soft a sigh, 
And bless the youth that bids her slumbers fly. 

The itinerant Savoyard leaving his native mountains is no less 
forcibly presented to us : — 

Where the blithe son of Savoy, journeying round 
With humble wares and pipe of merry sound, 
From his green vale and sheltered cabin hies, 
And scales the Alps to visit foreign skies ; 
Tho' far below the forked lightnings play, 
And at his feet the thunders die away, 
Oft, in the saddle rudely rocked to sleep, 
While his mule browses on the dizzy steep, 
With Memory' 's aid, he sits at home, and sees 
His children sport beneath their native trees, 
And bends to hear their cherub-voices call, 
O'er the loud fury of the torrent's fall. 

Even when he describes - some abstract operation of memory, 
he borrows his illustration from attachments, having indeed 
little, if any, relation with the subject, but which are calculated 
to touch a sympathetic chord in the dullest breast : — 

Ah ! who can tell the triumphs of the mind, 
By truth illumined and by taste refined ? 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 149 

When age has quenched the eye, and closed the ear, 
Still nerved for action in her native sphere, 
Oft will she rise, with searching glance pursue 
Some long-loved image vanished from her view ; 
Dart thro' the deep recesses of the past, 
O'er dusky forms in chains of slumber cast, 
With giant-grasp fling back the folds of night, 
And snatch the faithless fugitive to light. 
So thro' the grove the impatient mother flies, 
Each sunless glade, each secret pathway tries ; 
Till the thin leaves the truant boy disclose, 
Long on the wood-moss stretched in sweet repose. 

I readily allow that these descriptions do not belong to a 
very high order of art, that they suggest too many comparisons 
with Goldsmith, that they only present the most glaring and 
most easily to be pourtrayed examples of his subjects ; still 
they have the rare merit of going directly to the heart, and of 
engaging it to take a lively interest in the simplest objects, 
unadorned with any tints except those reflected from nature. 
The charm of material delineation is striking in itself, but this 
is only made the medium of reflecting back on the soul the 
sunniest associations of its own existence, sometimes with 
double force, as mirrored in the experience of others. Rogers 
had a genuine love for the artistic phase of every sort of 
existence. Nothing seemed to interest him till it was in- 
vested with that colouring which made the object rather a 
spiritual embodiment than a material picture ; but that spiritual 
embodiment was not derived from the lofty nature of ideal con- 
ception, but from the quieter affections of the human breast. 
As such, he is entitled to a place in the same division of poets 
as Goldsmith; but from his want of imaginative conception, 
from the predominance of mere fancy in his works, rather 
combining the thoughts of others than originating any of his 
own, his position will naturally fall among the lowest group. 

Though Rogers came before the world on five different occa- 
sions after his "Pleasures of Memory," to challenge attention for 



150 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

his muse, it was rather to decrease than enhance his reputation. 
Indeed, his debut and exit as an author were alike fatal. His 
"Ode to Superstition" requires a painful effort to read. His 
"Italy" few would dream of opening, were it not for the divine 
etchings of Stothard and Turner. In his "Epistle on Taste," 
published in 1796, and in his "Human Life," written twenty- 
three years afterwards, we find something like the same vigour 
as in his great poem • but the public expected to encounter 
greater beauties ; and when they discovered he had hardly 
equalled, the intensity of their disappointment led them to 
believe he had fallen far below, his previous effort. But 
these two poems evince great merit, simply because the author 
confines himself within the limited range of his powers, and 
does not break away from the ground which he occupies with 
such force in his "Pleasures of Memory." Indeed, these two 
poems would require very little adaptation to fit into the frame- 
work of their predecessor. In that on " Human Life," we get 
hardly anything else than a succession of pictures illustrating 
the various affections as imaged in the different stages of being 
which impart to them vitality. He throws no light on the 
grand problems of existence. On one occasion only does he 
become psychological, and then merely to dish up a hackneyed 
argument for the immortality of the soul : — 

Do what he will, man cannot realize 
Half he conceives — the glorious vision flies. 
Go where he may, he cannot hope to find 
The truth, the beauty pictured in the mind. 
But if, by chance, an object strike the sense, 
The faintest shadow of that excellence, 
' Passions, that slept, are stirring in his frame ; 
Thoughts undefined, feelings without a name ; 
And some, not here called forth, may slumber on, 
Till this vain pageant of a world is gone ; 
Lying too deep for things that perish here, 
Waiting for life, — but in a nobler sphere. 

The picture of the true wife, drawn with more completeness 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 151 

and originality, furnishes a contrast to the mere woman of 
fashion, in his Epilogue for Mrs. Siddons : — 

His house she enters, there to be a light, 
Shining within, when all without is night ; 
A guardian- angel o'er his life presiding, 
Doubling his pleasures, and his cares dividing ; 
Winning him back, when mingling in the throng, 
From a vain world we love, alas ! too long, 
To fireside happiness and hours of ease, 
Blest with that charm, the certainty to please. 
How oft her eyes read his ; her gentle mind 
To all his wishes, all his thoughts inclined ; 
Still subject, ever on the watch to borrow 
Mirth of his mirth, and sorrow of his sorrow. 
The soul of music slumbers in the shell, 
Till waked and kindled by the master's spell; 
And feeling hearts — touch them but rightly — pour 
A thousand melodies unheard before ! 

Though this is genuine poetry, it is not of a high class ; but 
Rogers falls miserably below this standard when he has to 
describe scenes in which deep passion ought to be evoked. 
The weak lines exemplifying filial affection in the meeting of 
Mary Roper with her venerable father on his way to the scaf- 
fold, are ill redeemed by such verses as the following, even had 
they the poor merit of originality : — 

To her, methinks a second youth is given, 
The light upon her face is light from heaven ! 
An hour like this is worth a thousand passed 
In pomp or ease. 'Tis present to the last ; — 
Years glide away untold : 'tis still the same. 

In the psychological argument the execution is better than 
the conception ; but in the following the conception is better 
than the execution : — 

Through the wide world he only is alone 
Who lives not for another. Come what will, 
The generous man has his companion still : 



152 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Even in an iron cage condemned to dwell, 
The cage that stands within his dungeon cell, 
He feeds his spider — happier at the worst 
Than he at large who in himself is curst ! 

It is only when the poet resumes his old task of pourtraying 
the sunnier aspects of humanity that vigour of thought is united 
with charm of expression, as in his picture of a mother fondling 
her baby-boy : — 

As with soft accents round her neck he clings, 
And cheek to cheek her soothing song she sings, 
How blest to feel the beatings of his heart ! 
Breathe his sweet breath, and kiss for kiss impart ; 
Watch o'er his slumbers like the brooding dove, 
And, if she can, exhaust a mother's love ! 

The "Epistle on Taste," though a far more unique produc- 
tion, does not increase our admiration of the poet to anything 
like the same degree as it raises our estimation of the man. 
Its principal charm consists in the combination of two con- 
trasts — that of the lettered ease and rustic enjoyments of a 
country villa with the bustling importunities of civic strife, in 
which, indeed, the poet had his model in Horace ; and the other 
of artistic refinement and aesthetic luxury, rather heightened 
than impaired by the humble resources of cottage life, which, 
while it serves to set them off. as a foil, imparts to them a 
zest they would not otherwise possess. Here the poet had no 
model at all but that supplied by his own good nature, which 
loved to place itself in a position attainable by most of his 
fellow-creatures, in order to show them that the most refined 
pleasures were not the appanage merely of the wealthy, but 
were like light, ready if not intercepted by the cloud of 
ignorance, to pour their sunshine on the multitude. With this 
design the poet lets us peep into his bath, his bedroom, and 
his study, each, though humble in themselves, embellished with 
appropriate pictures, which breathe a soul into the silent walls, 
and with busts which exhibit in their features all the noblest 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 153 

thoughts of the characters they represent. But these orna- 
ments, not being originals, are inexpensive ; for the poet, 
instead of littering his rooms with the works of inferior artists, 
prefers to surround himself with cheap copies of the best 
masters. By this means the poet enforces the doctrine, which 
derives double force from the advocacy of a millionnaire, that 
the perfection of taste consists in producing the greatest effects 
by the smallest means : — 

Be mine to bless the more mechanic skill, 
That stamps, renews, and multiplies at will ; 
And cheaply circulates thro' distant climes, 
The fairest relics of the purest times. 
Here from the mould to conscious being start 
Those finer forms, the miracles of art ; 
Here chosen gems, imprest on sulphur, shine, 
That slept for sages in a second mine ; 
And here the faithful graver dares to trace 
A Michael's grandeur and a Raphael's grace ! 
Thy gallery, Florence, gilds my humble walls, 
And my low roof the Vatican recalls ! 

* * * * * 

Tho' my thatch'd bath no rich mosaic knows, 
A limpid spring with unfelt current flows. 
Emblem of life ! which, still as we survey, 
Seems motionless, yet ever glides away ; 
The shadowy walls record, with Attic art, 
The strength and beauty which its waves impart. 
Here Thetis, bending, with a mother's fears, 
Dips her dear boy, whose pride restrains his tears ; 
There Venus, rising, shrinks with sweet surprise, 
As her fair self reflected seems to rise ! 

The contrast between the pleasures which the poet enjoys 
in this remote retreat and the bustling importunities of town 
life, if not brought out with the bold outline and caustic irony 
of Horace, it is because the silkiness of the poet's nature leads 
him to avoid the more striking for the quieter lights and 
shades of the picture : — • 



154 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



Far from the joyless glare, the maddening strife, 

And all the dull impertinence of life, 

These eyelids open to the rising ray, 

And close, when nature bids, at close of day. 

Here, at the dawn, the kindling landscape glows ; 

There, noonday levees call from faint repose. 

Here, the flushed wave flings back the parting light ; 

There, glimmering lamps anticipate the night. 

Rogers thus sketches himself in the fields : — 

When Spring bursts forth in blossoms thro' the vale, 
And her wild music triumphs on the gale, 
Oft with my book I muse from stile to stile ; 
Oft in my porch the listless noon beguile, 
Training loose numbers, till declining day, 
Thro' the green trellis shoots a crimson ray ; 
Till the west-wind leads on the twilight hours, 
And shakes the fragrant bells of closing flowers. 

With his own quiet pursuits, the author contrasts those of the 
furred -beauty who comes emblazoned with her jewels to startle, 
midnight in Grosvenor Square : — 

There let her strike with momentary ray, 
As tapers shine their little lives away ; 
There let her practise from herself to steal, 
And look the happiness she does not feel ; 
The ready smile and bidden blush employ, 
At Faro routs, that dazzle to destroy ; 
Fan with affected ease the essenced air, 
And lisp of fashions with unmeaning stare : 
Be thine to meditate an humbler flight, 
When morning fills the fields with rosy light ; 
Be thine to blend, without one vulgar aim, 
Repose with dignity ; with quiet, fame. 

But these by no means present the most startling contrasts 
which his subject placed within his reach, and which the poet 
judiciously avoided from his want of sustained force and vigour. 
Even the sketches he presents in "The Epistle" lack com- 
pleteness, T hile those in the poem on human life, though more 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL, 155 

finished, are arranged without order, as they group themselves 
in the poet's fancy, without reference to any philosophical prin- 
ciple whatever. These poems, therefore, only confirm the esti- 
mate already formed of Rogers' powers, as one possessing all 
the catholic tenderness of Goldsmith, without his vigour, and 
Cowper's keen perception of natural beauties, without his feli- 
city of expression. But these qualities were materially enhanced 
by aesthetic culture and a world-embracing circle of heartfelt 
sympathies, equally beyond both. It is these sympathies which 
ennoble the humblest of his performances, and which will obtain 
for him readers when the works of some of the more ostenta- 
tious of his contemporaries are neglected. 

Of the minor pieces of Rogers, with the exception of " Loch 
Long," one or two short ditties, and the charming Epilogue, in 
which he dashes off with great spirit the five stages in the life of 
a woman of fashion, I can only say it would have been much 
better had they not been written ■ or, if written, that they had 
not been flouted in the face of posterity. There is, however, 
among them, a sonnet to the torso of Hercules, which, in the 
gardens of the Vatican, had often caught the admiring gaze of 
Michael Angelo, Raphael, and the two Caracci, and which in 
turn was destined to inspire the English poet with the noblest 
lines he ever wrote : — 

And dost thou still, thou mass of breathing stone 
(Thy giant limbs to night and chaos hurled), 
Still sit as on the fragment of a world ; 
Surviving all, majestic and alone ? 
What tho' the spirits of the North, that swept 
Rome from the earth, when in her pomp she slept, 
Smote thee with fury ; and thy headless trunk 
Deep in the dust 'mid tower and temple sunk ; 
Soon to subdue mankind 'twas thine to rise 
Still, still unquelled thy glorious energies ! 
Aspiring minds, with thee conversing, caught 
Bright revelations of the good they sought ; 
By thee that long-lost spell, in secret given, 
To draw down gods, and lift the soul to heaven ! 



156 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



THE chief of the classical poets of the present century is 
Campbell ; and, judging from the manner in which this 
school has so completely died out, his sovereignty over it, is not 
likely to be disturbed during the present generation. But his 
own pre-eminence is so great, that even were the school in 
fashion, rivalship, during the next thirty years, would be a thing 
almost impossible : for poets with the impassioned stateliness 
of Gray, or with the deep plaintiveness of Collins, seldom appear 
even once in a century. But how much rarer must the appearance 
of those be who combine, to a large extent, the excellences of 
both ? Such was Campbell, who has all Gray's merits, allied to 
as much of Collins's exquisite pathos as can be detached from 
spiritual forms and wedded to earthly objects. Campbell's fire 
and energy raise him above Gray, but his lack of ideality places 
him below Collins. He has, however, the advantage of being 
more varied in style, of choosing his subjects from a wider 
range of objects, and of displaying keener sympathies for his 
fellow-men than either. A Greek reticence of language, exube- 
rance of classical imagery, ornate diction so exquisitely polished 
as to make each word shed a diamond lustre over the thought, 
equally characterise the three poets. In Collins, however, this 
glittering raiment seems the natural expression of his mind, 
fitting it as closely and tightly as a skin. But in Campbell, as 
in Gray, the labour of the artist is visible in the artificial con- 
struction of phrase which occasionally diverts attention from the 
thoughts to the words in which they are expressed — a defect 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 157 

so much the more serious, because it inverts the functions 
of language, which ought, like light, to remain hidden while 
revealing everything else with which it is brought into contact. 

It is this fastidiousness with respect to style that constitutes 
Campbell's peculiar glory and weakness. All his pieces display 
perfect elaboration of finish ; but he appears to have sacrificed 
everything else to obtain it. In his longer poems, the action 
is as much neglected as the style is polished. Impoverished 
conception of plan is united with faultless execution of details. 
There is, however, one advantage arising out of Campbell's 
fastidiousness, that his pages are perfectly free from what is 
called waste writing. This is most evident in his lesser poems, 
hardly a line of which occurs without some beauty. If a stanza 
did not please him, he drew his pen across it without the slight- 
est remorse, as I have seen Herbert put his knife through a 
picture which would have made the fortune of many a younger 
artist. In this respect Campbell stands out in pleasing contrast 
to Wordsworth and Southey. If any of their compositions were 
unsatisfactory, their only resource was to add as many dozen 
lines more to the peccant part with a view to conceal, if they 
failed to enliven, its dullness. But Campbell resolutely applied 
the incision knife, and if the vital organism of the piece was 
injured thereby, threw the whole away. Wordsworth and 
Southey most piously treasured up every verse which they 
composed. But Campbell had a most provoking habit of tear- 
ing up nearly everything he wrote, and scattering the fragments 
of paper out of his study window; whence it came to pass, 
when the wind blew in one direction, that the cabbages and 
gooseberry-bushes of his neighbour's garden at Sydenham looked 
in the dog-days very much as if a theatrical snow-storm had 
burst over them. The result of this is, that Campbell is now 
seldom read except as a whole, Wordsworth only in parts, and 
Southey not at all. 

The "Pleasures of Hope" displays all the ardour and impetu- 
osity of youthful genius blended with those faults to whi ch most 



158 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

young writers are liable, of caring much more for sound than sense, 
and cumbering immature designs with profusion of florid orna- 
ments. The description of the shipwreck is powerfully given. 
The "Siege of Warsaw" still retains its place as the first battle- 
piece in the language, with that powerful shriek which is des- 
tined to vibrate through the hearts of patriots for all time. But 
the effects of hope upon the imagination, and the aspirations 
of genius, as indeed all that portion of the poem which required 
calm philosophical treatment, are inadequately pourtrayed. It 
is on this account that Rogers' "Memory" satisfies the judgment 
more ; for though immeasurably Campbell's inferior in wielding 
the lightnings of passion, Rogers evinces far greater skill in meta- 
physical analysis. His transitions are more distinct, and he 
passes with greater ease from one topic to another ; whereas 
in Campbell the transitions are unnatural, and their stiffly arti- 
ficial character does not always prevent the subjects from run- 
ning into each other. In Rogers, the language is invariably 
suited to the thought. But with Campbell it not unfrequently 
happens, that in proportion to the weakness of the thought, the 
strength of the language becomes apparent, until we are reminded 
of the pale, consumptive figure of Ruthven, in Maclise's picture, 
trying to stand erect beneath the suit of heavy-mailed armour 
which is dragging him to the ground. This blending of two 
incongruous elements produces in Campbell a similar effort tc 
appear stronger than he really is, and to make up for interna 
stamina by grinding of the teeth and other spasmodic exhibi- 
tions of muscular violence. But as a work of genius, defective 
as it is in parts, yet grand in its irregularities, the poem of 
Rogers must yield the palm to Campbell's, who, in this the 
greenest of his productions, soars far higher than his con- 
temporary ever did in the full maturity of his powers. 

From the persistent manner in which the author's name was 
coupled with the " Pleasures of Hope," it might be thought the 
author set more value on this poem than on anything else he had 
ever written. But Campbell's taste was too exquisite to allow 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 159 

him to entertain any such conceit. On the contrary, it was one 
of the standing annoyances of his life that he should be only 
known by a performance which evinced all the crudeness and 
immaturity of youthful genius. But his hatred of the practice 
could not put it down. Whenever a paper chronicled his 
arrival in a foreign town, it was always Mr. Campbell, the 
author of the " Pleasures of Hope." When he was introduced 
at Court, it was as the author of the "Pleasures of Hope." 
He was hardly ever pointed out in street, or assembly, with- 
out the same startling sound, the author of the " Pleasures of 
Hope." If any toast was coupled with his name at a convivial 
meeting, down came the fatal affix in defiance of the protesta- 
tions of the author. Campbell struggled against his destiny in 
vain. The book- trade would not advertise his poems without 
the same magic title. As in life, so it was in death. When 
his coffin was lowered into the vault at Westminster Abbey, 
the plate was found to contain the inscription, "Thomas 
Campbell, author of the ' Pleasures of Hope/ " And no 
sooner was the stone laid over the grave than the attention 
of the reader was arrested by the same ominous words, 
coupling his names by iron links with that production for all 
future generations. 

Campbell always avoided lengthy subjects, which is a sign 
that he mistrusted his powers. None of his pieces evince much 
skill, either in delineation of character or construction of plot. 
His "Gertrude of Wyoming " and " O'Conner's Child " are too 
short for that purpose. His " Theodoric " is so far below him, 
that it ought never to have been printed. To call the " Pilgrim 
of Glencoe " a narrative poem would be absurd. The " Pleasures 
of Hope/' so far as it does not evade analysis, is only a succession 
of pictures, "like pearls upon a thread at random strung," having 
no connection beyond the feeling of expectancy which this gay 
deceiver awakes in the human breast. Ideality, or that quality 
which invests the universe with ethereal splendour, to which 
its own sunshine is but a shadow, is not in his works pro- 



160 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

minently conspicuous. Part of the scenery of " Wyoming " is 
drawn with a magical pencil : — 

A valley from the river shore withdrawn, 
Was Albert's home, two quiet woods between, 
Whose lofty verdure overlook'd his lawn ; 
And waters to their resting-place serene 
Came fresh'ning, and reflecting all the scene : 
(A mirror in the depth of flowery shelves :) 
So sweet a spot of earth, you might, I ween, 
Have guess'd some congregation of the elves, 
To sport by summer moons, had shaped it for themselves.* 

But we generally find the colouring in the quiet parts of the 
poem is not sustained, and that the effect is owing to a few 
fairy tints artistically introduced to brighten up much that is 
commonplace, rather than to the overflowing prodigality of a 
gorgeous imagination. These gems stand out more or less 
isolated, so that the stanzas appear to have been framed as a 
foil to set off their beauty rather than to carry forward the 
action of the poem. How tame would be the description of 
Gertrude hastening home at early morn, were it not for the line, 

While yet the wild deer trod in spangling dew,+ 

or of Gertrude herself, were it not for the sunniness of her eyes, 

in which 

Their ninth blue summer shone, % 
and 

Which seemed to love whate'er they looked upon ; § 

or for the picture of the white boy led by the swarthy Indian, 
were it not for the simile comparing him to morning brought 
by night. The reader's taste is rather sharpened than gratified 
by beauties of this character, which are no sooner introduced 
than they are lost in the dreariness of commonplace, leaving 
behind a vain regret that such magic tints should be so tran- 
sitory, like the gleams of light which are swallowed up by 

* Part 2, st. i. + Part 2, st. viii. % P art l > st - xn - § P art 2 > st - i y - 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 161 

April clouds as soon as they appear, or the perfumes from a 
tuft of March violets, which no sooner hit the sense than 
they are carried off by the wind in an opposite direction. 

These spiritual touches are more apt to stamp the mind's 
features, than those of a material landscape, on his pages, and 
accordingly Campbell is more effective in his characters than 
in his scenery. The countenance of Albert is well shaded : — 

And though amidst the calm of thought entire, 
Some high and haughty features might betray 
A soul impetuous once, 'twas earthly fire 
That fled composure's intellectual ray, 
As Etna's fires grow dim before the rising day. * 

He said — and strain'd unto his heart the boy : 
Far differently the mute Oneida took 
His calumet of peace, and cup of joy ; 
As monumental bronze unchanged his look ; 
A soul that pity touch'd, but never shook : 
Train'd from his tree-rock'd cradle to his bier 
The fierce extremes of good and ill to brook 
Impassive — fearing but the shame of fear — 
A stoic of the woods — a man without a tear.f 

But these portraits, while they present the type of a class, lack 
the features of an individual, and the incidents with which the 
originals are brought into contact too unfavourably remind 
us of others to which they are inferior. The character of Oneida 
is not anything like so minutely developed as that of Chactas, 
from which it is taken, though his physiognomy possesses 
qualities more frank and local than Atala's lover, because 
Oneida had not been half civilized by contact with the inha- 
bitants of Europe. The infancy and love of Waldgrave and 
Gertrude too much remind us of the exquisite group of Paul 
and Virginia ; but Campbell has made no more than a sketch 
of a subject which in the hands of Bernardin de St. Pierre 
comprises a finished picture. 
It would, however, be unjust to Campbell to leave the reader 

* Part i., St. viii. f Part i., st. xxiii. 

II 



1 62 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

without the impression that, wherever his subject admitted of 
it, he could attain the sublime without effort. In the lower 
region of ideality he seems to have trod with the fear of the 
critics before his eyes, but in the upper, he seems to have for- 
gotten that such beings were in existence. Though his imagi- 
native flights are not frequent, he maintains himself in the loftiest 
sphere of sublimity with the same ease and dignity as if it were 
his natural home. The immensity of the ocean is nowhere so 
adequately imaged as by representing it as a mirror wherein 
all the stars can see themselves at once, or as that element 
by which our earth, otherwise opaque, is rendered luminous to 
distant orbs. And again : 

Earth has not a plain 
So boundless or so beautiful as thine : 
The eagle's vision cannot take it in ; 
The lightning's wing, too weak to sweep its space, 
Sinks half way o'er it, like a wearied bird. 

The lordliest floods 
And cataracts are drops of dew 
To thee, that couldst subdue the earth itself, 
And brook'st commandment from the heavens alone 
In marshalling thy waves. 

But it is in his address to the dead eagle that Campbell rises 
to the elevation of his subject, and makes us regret that his 
desire of disarming criticism by faultless execution should 
have deterred him from selecting a theme which would have 
given wider range to his great powers. With what majesty he 
invests his subject : — 

Fallen as he is, this king of birds still seems 
Like royalty in ruins. Though his eyes 
Are shut, that looked undazzled in the sun, 
He was the sultan of the sky, and earth 
Paid tribute to his eyry. It was perch'd 
Higher than human conqueror ever built 
His banner 'd fort. Where Atlas' top looks o'er 
Sahara's desert to the Equator's line ; 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 163 



From thence the winged despot marked his prey, 
Above the encampments of the Bedouins, ere 
Their watch-fires were extinct, or camels knelt 
To take their loads, or horsemen scoured the plain ; 
And there he dried his feathers in the dawn, 
Whilst yet the unwakened world was dark below. 

The aeronaut drifts, in his silken vehicle, 

The passive plaything of the winds. Not such 

Was this proud bird : he clove the adverse storm, 

And cuffed it with his wings. He stopped his flight 

As easily as the Arab reins his steed, 

And stood at pleasure 'neath Heaven's zenith, like 

A lamp suspended from its azure dome. 

Whilst underneath him the world's mountains lay 

Like molehills, and her streams like lucid threads ; 

Then downwards, faster than a falling star, 

He neared the earth, until his shape distinct 

Was blackly shadowed on the sunny ground ; 

And deeper terror hushed the wilderness 

*Eo hear his nearer whoop. 

*\ * * * * * 

His bright eyes were his compass, earth his chart, 
His'talons anchor'd on the stormiest cliff, 
And on the very lighthouse-rock he perched 
When winds churned white the waves. 

" The Last Man " we need not quote, as it is in everybody's 
memory. For instances of the sublime called up by a few 
graphic touches, it is perhaps unequalled in any language. 
But these efforts, great as they are, on account of their short 
and fragmentary character, do not constitute anything like the 
substance of those claims to distinction on which this poet's 
reputation rests. 

In what, then, does Campbell's greatness consist, since he 
holds a place in our literature, both lofty and unique,which could 
not be filled up with any other bust than his own ? It is un- 
doubtedly in his command over the feelings, in his exquisite 
pathos,in his power to stir the breast with martial ardour as with 



i6j ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

a trumpet, in the soft emotions he conjures up in his bowers of 
love, and the red glare he throws over his battle-fields. But 
Campbell rarely paints love except in contact with death, when 
it assumes hues which speak to us of heaven. It is not over 
Armida in her paradisal gardens, the representative of volup- 
tuousness, but over Waldgrave in the lifeless arms of Gertrude, 
or the young wife bending over the corpse of her bleeding 
Hussar, that Campbell loves to linger ; and in scenes of this 
character it must be confessed he has no master. The sailor 
ploughing the billowy wave, or the soldier keeping watch " with 
the sentinel stars in the sky," have no more faithful delineator 
of their hopes and their fears, their anxious home-yearnings, 
and the terrible depths of that love which increases in propor- 
tion to the distance of its object, than Campbell. The passion 
he loves to portray is not that which satisfies the cravings of 
the senses, but that which spiritualizes our nature by attuning 
all its chords to pity. The scenes of the Napoleonic cam- 
paigns, echoing their thunders daily in his ears, appear to have 
haunted his imagination, and enabled him to reproduce with 
tenfold force all the engines of human butchery which 
ingenuity could devise, in contrast with the softest emotions of 
the human heart. I know not whether his genius is more 
evinced in these contrasts, than in the description of the battle 
itself. His rapid transitions, the quickness with which he 
hurries us along, recalls the sudden evolutions of troops ; his 
terse imagery illuminating everything on which it falls, the 
concentrative flash of lightning, and his sonorous periods, 
those volleyed peals of thunder with which the artillery of his 
combatants at intervals tears the heavens. The awful stillness 
at the close which curtains the dismal havoc, or that unquench- 
able thirst for freedom, which turns the blood-besprinkled dust 
of the patriot's death-bed into a couch of glory, is given with 
a fidelity seldom equalled in poetry, and certainly never sur- 
passed. Let the reader compare the " Battle of Hohenlinden," 
or the " Death-struggle at Warsaw," with Montgomery's "Alex- 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 165 

andria," or Scott's " Waterloo," and he will be startled at the 
difference between the diffusiveness of mere poetic ability and 
the vigorous strength of genius. It is on account of this fire 
and energy, enveloped, as it occasionally is in his lyrics, in the 
silken veil of plaintiveness, and always expressed in the choicest 
language, that Campbell is entitled to a place in the second 
division of poets. I do not know that anybody would dispute 
his claim to being the first martial lyric poet of his country. 
Had Burns cultivated this vein more than he did, he would 
have been obliged, though in other respects his master, in 
this field at least, to yield precedence to his countryman. 
Campbell has a distinct speciality as the Tyrtseus of modern 
England. The keen sympathy which he always felt for the 
oppressed in every part of the world, the ardour with which his 
soul always glowed for freedom, imparted a vital intensity to 
those strains which may fairly challenge for him the proud title 
of the Bard of National Independence. 



1 66 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



WOAtx Safop %wxbax. 



LANDOR was a man of crotchety nature, of liberal but 
capricious sympathies. His feelings, though deep and 
capable of great expansion, were never under the control of a 
comprehensive intellect. He saw into the heart of nothing. 
He seems to have been born with a mind blurred over with 
ingrained prejudices, from which he could no more escape than 
from his own identity. As such, he would have furnished a 
very good exemplification of Descartes' doctrine of innate ideas. 
He also manifested from his cradle upwards a certain querulous- 
ness, which made him in youth quarrel with his tutors, in middle 
life with his tenants and his country, and in old age with his 
wife and himself. Hence, poor Landor, though blessed with 
robust health, and with all the luxuries that can make health 
enjoyable, had a sad time of it during his protracted sojourn 
amongst us. His life was little better than a battle and a 
march. He early left England for France, under the impression 
that its laws afforded no shelter for an honest man ; but tired 
of France, he tried Italy. After a migratory sojourn in Italy, 
he came back to England, which he forsook for Italy again. 
Other poets have been buffeted about by the restless tide of 
necessity, but Lander's wanderings had no assignable cause but 
caprice. He appears to have thoroughly understood nobody, 
and nobody appears to have thoroughly understood him. His 
heart was not selfish, nor his temperament hypochondriacal. 
But he had certain abstract notions of right and wrong which he 
persisted in carrying out, totally regardless of the actual fitness 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 167 

of things, or the social framework into which he was born. In 
the same manner, he had certain antique notions of art which 
he persisted in embodying in his works, without wasting a 
thought upon the suitability of such notions to the requirements 
of modern civilization. Hence, Landor, with a hand always 
ready to defend, and a purse always open to assist, the helpless, 
was the most unpopular man of his day ; and with invention 
and imagination of no mean order, his poems were even less 
appreciated than himself. 

The mind of Landor was cast in a mould essentially antique. 
He belonged more to the Rome of Camillus than to any other 
era of recorded time ; for his habits were simple, his hatred of 
kings intense, his study of Greek models incessant. The Latin 
language was as familiar to him as his own, and had his pre- 
ference not been interfered with, he would have chosen it as the 
vehicle of his thoughts to the world. As it is, many of his 
shorter pieces are written in Latin, which he thought was 
destined to replace the modern jargons of Europe. The Gothic 
element, out of which they had arisen, was to Landor essentially 
barbarous • and nothing like correct taste, until that element 
was eliminated, could be established among mankind. Hence, 
such of his pieces as are not Latin, or, like his Hellenics, direct 
translations from his Latin poems, wear a certain staid classical 
air, just as if Valerius Flaccus had discarded the toga and 
popped upon us in an English frock-coat and tight waistcoat. 
There is, in his pages, an absence of genuine bursts of feeling, 
a statuesque immobility, a serene chilliness, and an utter want 
of interest to support the reader in deciphering the meaning 
which constantly eludes his grasp. Yet Wordsworth declared 
he would sooner be the author of Landor's poems than of any 
other which had appeared during his time, and Southey 
averred that Landor nearly rivalled Milton. ' If Wordsworth 
was sincere, he was most inconsistent ; for no poet so violently 
transgressed every precept of the Wordsworthian theory as 
Landor. But Southey's praise came direct from the heart. 



168 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

The opinion he expressed was the quintessence of candour 
and folly. 

The connection between Southey and Landor constitutes one 

of the curiosities of literature. The temperaments of the two 

men were as conflicting as their principles, and their habits as 

antithetical as either ; yet the extraordinary relish which both 

manifested for each other's poems became the foundation of a 

life-enduring friendship. It mattered little to Southey that 

Landor was a deist in religion, a republican in politics, the 

lampooner of his patrons, the defender of measures which 

Southey believed to be destructive of public morality, — Landor 

was the author of " Gebir " and " Julian," and as such entitled 

to the first place in his bosom. It mattered little to Landor 

that Southey was a bigoted Tory, a red-hot Churchman, the 

unflinching apostle of every doctrine he loathed, and the stout 

panegyrist of the men whom he abhorred, — Southey was the 

author of " Madoc," and therefore entitled to Landor^s most 

cherished affection. By mutual gratulation they persuaded 

each other to persist in a course which rendered success 

impossible. Had not Landor volunteered to print Southey's 

poems at his own expense, his epical career would have been 

cut short with " Madoc." Had not Southey interposed to find 

a publisher for " Julian," Landor would have had to consult the 

taste of his epoch, or to abandon Parnassus. The fascination 

which Landor's poems had for Southey was hardly surpassed by 

the fascination which Southey's poems had for Landor. To 

some extent they bore a family likeness, and each, therefore, in 

praising the other was only justifying himself. Both were about 

the same remove from mediocrity; both constructed their works 

upon principles which completely override the genuine impulses 

of nature, and both sought to make up for their lack of dramatic 

interest, the one by statuesque embodiments of passion, the 

other by gorgeous scenic descriptions. Both in their poetical 

capacity failed to interest the age, and both thought that this 

was their highest badge of merit. It was this identity of the 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 169 

poetical situation which bridged over the gulf which separated 
their political and religious life, and made two individuals bris- 
tling with antagonisms, the staun chest associates and friends. 
So great is the cementing influence of disappointed ambitions ! 
"Gebir," which always possessed extraordinary fascination 
for Southey, may be said to be the first piece Landor wrote of 
any significance. The moral of the story consists in showing 
how far more sensible and felicitous is a life devoted to the 
pursuits of love and peace than to those of war and ambition. 
The hero is king of Gibraltar, who, on some miserable 
pretence of requiting Egypt for sheltering the enemies of his 
ancestors, invades that country at the head of ten thousand 
men. But Charoba, the young Egyptian queen, instead of 
fighting her assailant, is impelled by her confidant, Dalica, 
to come to some amicable adjustment with Gebir. The two 
monarchs very naturally fall in love with each other as soon as 
they meet. But very unnaturally, Dalica, mistaking her mis- 
tress's emotions of love for ebullitions of anger, proceeds to 
consult her witch-sister, Myrthir, as to the best means of 
extricating Charoba from her embarrassing position. These 
two people enweave a poisonous robe, which, like the shirt of 
Nessus, was destined to make very short work of the life of 
the wearer. But, before Gebir is presented with this bridal 
garment of death, the reader, on the morning of the day, gets 
a charming glimpse of Charoba at her morning ablutions : — 

Next to her chamber, closed by cedar doors, 
A bath of purest marble, purest wave, 
On its fair surface bore its pavement high : 
Arabian gold enchased the crystal roof, 
With fluttering boys adorn'd, and girls unrobed ; 
These when you touch the quiet water, start 
From their aerial sunny arch, and pant 
Entangled 'mid each other's flowery wreaths, 
And each pursuing is in turn pursued. 
Here came * * * * 

Charoba : long she lingered at the brink ; 
Often she sighed ; and, naked as she was, 



1 70 ES TIM A TE OF MODERN ENGLISH FOE TS. 

Sat down, and leaning on the couch's edge, 

On the soft inward pillow of her arm 

Rested her burning cheek : she moved her eyes ; 

She blush'd ; and, blushing, plunged into the wave.* 

Arrayed in costly jewels, the queen unwittingly proceeds to 
invest Gebir, as he sits enthroned, with the envenomed robe, at 
a festal gathering of the two nations. Her lover's first pallor, 
Charoba mistakes for the influences of love, when, to her 
horror, he expires in agonies of pain, and the two nations, 
recently reconciled by the alliance between their youthful 
monarchs, start asunder crowned with the garlands and in the 
midst of the festivity intended to consummate their union. 

This is the main trunk of the story. But there are two 
episodes intertwined with it which bring out the opposite side 
of the contrast. Gebir has a brother engaged in the quiet 
pursuits of shepherd life. This brother captivates a sea- 
nymph, who reveals her fondness for him by inviting him to a 
wrestling-match, in which she proves the victor. The nymph, 
however, acted with an astuteness hardly to be reconciled with 
deep affection. For, knowing her power, she allows Tamar to 
risk one of his sheep as his prize in the contest, against which 
she has nothing to wager but articles of no appreciable value to 
a seaside shepherd : — 

But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue 

Within, and they that lustre have imbibed 

In the sun's palace porch, where, when unyoked, 

His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave : 

Shake one, and it awakens ; then apply 

Its polish'd lips to your attentive ear, i 

And it remembers its august abodes, 

And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there, f 

But the nymph, after prostrating her beloved, very selfishly runs 
off with his sheep, and leaves Tamar gazing after her in very 
vacant fashion : — 

* Book vii., Is. 81 — 95. f Book L, Is. 159 — 66. 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 



Restless, then ran I to the highest ground, 
To watch her ; she' was gone, gone down the tide, 
And the long moonbeam on the hard wet sand, 
Lay like a jasper column half upreared.* 

It is this considerate nymph whom Gebir resolves to consult, 
that he may baffle the demoniac powers in Egypt, who have 
razed to the foundations a city which, at the desire of Charoba, 
he has been vainly endeavouring to build up. By her instruc- 
tions, he performs certain rites at the place where his half- 
erected city disappeared, when the earth opens, and Gebir, 
descending into a yawning chasm, finds himself at once con- 
fronted by the spirits who have served their time out in the 
flesh, and with a crowd of others who are waiting to take their 
turn on the stage of the future. At the entrance he meets 
Aroar, a weird personage, who is neither alive or dead, but who 
contrives to amuse himself with politics, and very obligingly 
offers to be Gebir's guide on the occasion. Dante peopled 
Hades with his personal enemies ; Ariosto with frigid, over- 
chaste women ; but Gebir meets no folks there but warriors, or 
those who have been or are destined to be impelled by the 
lust of conquest or power. Foremost among these tortured 
shades are Gebir's own ancestors. The hero then makes the 
acquaintance of the Stewarts, both father and son, and then is 
introduced to the immortal William, to whom, according to 
Southey, we are indebted, not only for' our glorious constitution, 
but for the preservation of Protestantism. But the triumph of 
the Orange champion, however sacred to his friend, seemed to 
Landor only fit to be jeered at in the vaults of hell. Among 
other persons pointed out by the mysterious guide as under- 
going condign punishment for his crimes, is George III., whom 
Southey placed in heaven, and held up to his readers as the 
incarnation of every public and private virtue. Landor, how- 
ever, takes rather a different view of this monarch, though 

* Book i., Is. 214—17. 



172 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

the portrait is somewhat disguised, to escape any notice the 
Attorney-General might have taken of the matter : — 

" Aroar ! what wretch that nearest us ? what wretch 
Is that, with eyebrows white and slanting brow ? 

He, too, among my ancestors ? " " O king, 
Iberia bore him ; but the breed accurst, 
Inclement winds blew blighting from north-east. " 

Gebir wishes to know by what crimes the man with the slanting 
brow had deserved his fate : — 

" He was a warrior, then, nor fear'd the gods ? " 

To whom Aroar : — 

' ' Gebir ! he fear'd the demons, not the gods, 
Tho' them indeed his daily face adored, 
And was no warrior ; yet the thousand lives 
Squander'd as stones to exercise a sling."* 

Leaving George to his fate, Aroar and his companion scramble 
beyond the boundary of hell to quieter regions, where they 
are visited by the breezes which scatter perfumes around their 
path, and the beams which fill with liquid light the groves 
of the blessed. Heaven and Hades, in the imagination alike of 
poets and divines, have been separated by a wide gulf of space, — 
so wide, indeed, that the lightning's wing, after a day's travel, 
would flag over it like that of a tired bird. But Landor treats 
the two regions as wings of one compartment, dividing them 
only by a flaming arch, which parts asunder every two years 
in order that the damned and the blessed may be refreshed with 
the sight of each other. They also derive from this ingenious 
contrivance the knowledge, not very gratifying to either party, 
that the fires which constitute the misery of the one conduces 
to the happiness of the other. 

The contrast between the fate of the ambitious and the 
peaceful is still more fully elaborated in the fortunate issue of 
* Book iii., Is. 131 — 42. 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 173 

Tamar's affairs as contrasted with the dolorous end of Gebir's 
over-vaulting aspirations. The sea-nymph conducts Tamar to 
her ocean grot, triumphant over the waves, surrounded by im- 
mortals who congratulate the shepherd on his coming happi- 
ness. But instead of describing the consummation of this rather 
singular courtship, we are merely introduced to the topography 
of the situation : — 

First arose 
To his astonish'd and delighted view 
The sacred isle that shrines the queen of love ; 
It stood so near him, so acute each sense, 
That not the symphony of lutes alone, 
Or coo serene, or billing strife of doves, 
But murmurs, whispers,— nay, the very sighs 
Which he himself had uttered once, he heard. 
Next, but long after and far off, appear 
The cloud-like cliffs and thousand towers of Crete, 
And farther to the right the Cyclades, 

****** 
He saw the land of Pelops, host of gods ; 
Saw the steep ridge where Corinth after stood, 
Beckoning the Ionians with their smiling arts, 
Into her sun-bright bay. * * * * 

****** 
And now the chariot of the sun descends, 
The waves rush hurried from his foaming steeds, 
Smoke issues from their nostrils at the gate, 
"Which, when they enter, with huge golden bar, 
Atlas, and Calpe close across the sea.* 

Thus, like Southey in critical emergencies, Landor is very dis- 
appointing : where we expect love-making, we get topographical 
information ; and while we wait for a description of internal 
emotion, we are driven to despair by the projection of a frieze. 
We are left entirely to our own imagination to realize the great 
bliss which Tamar is enjoying as a counterfoil to the miseries 
reserved for his unfortunate brother, though the dark side of 
the picture is minutely portrayed. Horrid warnings assail 
* End of Book vi. 



174 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Gebir on the very morning Tamar is led over the waves to 
his bridal home. About to snatch his triumph, he is circum- 
vented by " pain, diseases, death," and all the other evils which 

Stamp on the slippery pavement of the proud, 
And ring their sounding emptiness through earth.* 

Tamar's happiness involved that of his nymph bride and all 
their associates. The disasters of Gebir destroyed the peace 
of Charoba and the fortunes of their subjects : — 

Thus raved Charoba : horror, grief, amaze, 
Pervaded all the host ; all eyes were fix'd ; 
All stricken motionless and mute. The feast 
Was like the feast of Cepheus, when the sword 
Of Phineus, white with wonder, shook restrain'd, 
And the hilt rattled in his marble hand. 
She heard not, saw not ; every sense was gone ; 
One passion banish'd all : dominion, praise, 
The world itself was nothing. Senseless man ! 
What would thy fancy figure now from worlds ? 
There is no world to them that grieve and love, t 

This poem ought to form the evangelium of the Peace 
Society, or of the .respectable confraternity of Quakers. For 
vice and virtue are identified in it with ambition and repose ; 
and war, no matter what its object, earns for its instigator 
eternal castigation. . 

" Gebir " is the most complete of Landor's poems. It also 
contains more effective passages than any other of his finished 
productions. Though written on the threshold of manhood, he 
never surpassed the effort ; in fact, he always seemed loathe to 
try. Yet "Gebir," though a striking production for a young 
man, will not place his name very high in the catalogue of 
poets. There is little imaginative passion in the piece, no flight 
from the region of incident into that of the abstract, nor is there 
any philosophy made sensible. The heart remains unmoved, 
and the understanding is not instructed. The utter improba- 

* Book vi., Is. 210 — n. + Book vii., Is. 224 — 34. 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 175 

bility of the story, and the absurd motives upon which the 
cardinal incidents of the piece turn, destroy all appearance 
of verisimilitude. To talk of deriving pleasure from a poem 
which one has to sit down to study like a geometrical problem, 
is out of all question. Hence " Gebir " has never had, nor is 
likely to have, many readers. Hitherto, few beyond Shelley, 
De Quincey, and Southey set any store by the volume : Shelley, 
for its wild radicalism ; De Quincey, for its plastic beauty ; and 
Southey, for its divine poetry. The two former qualities it 
possesses in a high degree ; the latter it certainly has not. 

The great fault of " Gebir " consists in inartistic treatment. 
The most prosaic details of the story are brought out, Southey- 
like, with painful elaboration ; while those, in which the 
reader might naturally have been led to take an interest, are 
either summarily disposed of or omitted altogether. Hence 
the reader moves along on a certain monotonous level, where 
at one point he ought to scale the Olympian heights of rap- 
ture, and at the next to be plunged in the abyss of despair. A 
bleak air of coldness chills even the warmest portions of 
the piece ; as if the story had been sculptured in a frieze, and 
Landor, instead of dealing with flesh-and-blood emotions, was 
only versifying marble. In " Gebir " — as, indeed, in most of 
Landor's other pieces — the best descriptions come upon us like 
a succession of statues or figures in bas-relievo. They are 
beautifully grouped, and exquisitely finished. They remind us 
of processions on antique marbles, or bronze mouldings on 
palace gates. We survey the works of the artist with a full 
appreciation of their beauty, but without feeling the slightest 
emotions of sympathy with the feelings they exhibit ; we move 
through the scenes he depicts as through a hall of statuary, 
and marvel that the artist who could call up such figures before 
us, should have lacked the power to endue them with passion 
and intelligence. 

Landor tried his hand at tragedy; but beyond incidental 
passages of some power, not to much effect. He regarded plot 



176 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

as mere trick. The ancients had not descended to it ; why 
should he ? The development of character arising out of the 
sequence of logical events, which constitutes the backbone of 
the modern drama, Landor thought unworthy of a sensible man. 
The stage should represent, not phases of action, but phases of 
suffering. This was natural enough when the faces of actors 
were covered with a mask, when a tragedy was a religious 
ceremony, when a chorus sermonized, at the end of the acts, 
upon the past, and threw out suggestions which prefigured the 
future. But to maintain this theory when the state of manners 
and society which necessitated it had passed away, would have 
been fatal to the genius of Shakespeare. But to Landor, the 
consequence has been simple extinction. None of his plays 
have been produced on the stage ; nor can they, without a 
considerable amount of tenacity, be mastered in the closet. 

It is remarkable that Landor should have selected for the 
subject of his first tragedy the downfall of the Spanish Roderic, 
a theme which Scott and Southey were already brooding over 
for poetic purposes, and that a subject so teeming with romantic 
incident should have experienced such scanty justice at their 
hands. Landor's tragedy is in reality only a succession of 
fragmentary conversations divided into scenes which have little 
apparent connection, unless we imagine the historical situation 
as the background. There is no plot, no evolution of character, 
no development of concerted action. Corilla, Julian's daughter, 
is seduced by Roderic ; Egilona, Roderic's wife, marries 
Abdalagis. But there are no love entanglements, no expres- 
sions of attachment from any of the parties, and we are only 
made aware of these facts, as in a Greek play, by incidental 
reflection, assuming that they have actually taken place. 
Moslem armies at the call of a recreant chief overrun Spain ; a 
throne is overturned ; the cross everywhere disappears before 
the crescent ; austere pontiffs exchange the mitre for the turban, 
the frigid pursuits of the cloister for the wanton dalliances of 
love. But with the exception of the invading army, none 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 177 



of these things appear in the tragedy, and the invading 
army is only introduced as an appendage to Julian, who 
disappears in a most unsatisfactory manner at the close, leaving 
the reader with the invading army in a state of embarrassment, 
the one with a half-completed conquest, the other with a story 
still more incomplete, which commences in the middle, and 
suddenly collapses before the end. In fact, Landor's design 
seems to have been not so much to write a tragedy, which his 
piece is wrongly named, but to hold up the chief personage in 
his group, in a position of monumental implacability to the end 
of time. Everything appears to be sacrificed to the character of 
Count Julian, who is incessantly produced on the scene as the 
very incarnation of abyssmal sorrow, who, in the midst of his 
victories, has no hope either from men in this world, or from 
God in the next. He feasts on grief, and really seems to enjoy 
the banquet in proportion to the bitterness of the viands served 
up to him. The ravishment of his daughter, the desolation of 
his kindred, the overturning of his creed, the butchery of his 
family, these are the things which, like the inverted pincushion 
of Villaneuf, he constantly presses to his heart, feeling no satis- 
faction but in the increase of his misery. As he has no pity 
on himself, he is inclined to have as little upon others. Nothing 
will content him but to have every one made as miserable as 
himself. The whole world must be involved in his ruin. His 
country he consigns to invaders, his religion to infidels, his 
wife and children to assassins, his daughter to exile, Roderic 
to ignominy, himself to perdition. Perhaps, there is no other 
example of sublime despair, of imperturbable grief, of lofty 
impenitence in any literature. But it is unnatural. We cannot 
conceive the existence of Landor's Julian in the world of fact, 
and in the world of art only as a monumental myth out of all 
character with the compatibilities of mediaeval existence. 

Landor was so wedded to classical forms as to dramatize the 
life of Giovanna of Naples under the form of a trilogy, the 
first play culminating in the murder of her husband, Andrea 

12 



178 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

of Hungary ; the second in the trial of the queen before Rienzi 
at Rome ; the third in the fall of Fra Rupert. His design 
was to rescue the fair queen from the cloud of suspicion under 
which she labours, conjointly with her Scottish cousin, of 
having been concerned in the plot which so summarily dis- 
posed of her husband. But Landor's success was by no means 
equal to the chivalry of the effort. He would not write for 
living England, but for dead Athens ; not for the present 
generation, but for a state of society more than two thousand 
years consigned to dust. Hence the greatest characters of the 
eighteenth century — Petrarch, Rienzi, Boccacio — are summoned 
before us ; kingdoms are revolutionized ; a lovely queen loses 
her throne, and goes through a succession of adventures, with- 
out exciting in us the slightest interest. All the characters 
seem cut out of the same block of granite ; and as they are 
found at the beginning, they remain to the end. His heroes 
never shape events : they are simply kicked about by circum- 
stance, and only speculate upon whatever card that unspiritual 
god chooses to turn up. 

Everything in the nature of action is supposed to take place 
behind the scenes. The reader knows nothing of any catas- 
trophe which may be in course of preparation, until it bursts 
upon him from the secret laboratory of Fate. By this con- 
trivance he is relieved of a certain amount of anxious suspense. 
He is also enabled to get through the most sensational page of 
the thirteenth century history, without experiencing a single 
feeling of vulgar interest. This was, to use Landor's phrase, 
treading down Alfieri at the heel. It was also treading down 
the patience of his readers. The trilogy, therefore, is the 
most unreadable portion of Landor's works. It is simply 
unintelligible without a reference to the history of the period, 
nor has it any form of dramatic life beyond that of imaginary 
conversations. 

How far Landor, had he given up his classical theories, 
would have been successful in this branch of his art, it is really 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 179 

impossible to say. He lacks pathos. He also exhibits no 
sense of the facetious. His histrionic mask evinces neither 
tears nor risibility. In particular passages, especially where there 
is room for statuesque display, he is very effective, as where 
Julian in the hour of victory confesses his own misery before 
the ruined Roderic, whom he has dethroned : — 

I stand abased before insulting crime. 
***** 

The hand that hurl'd thy chariot o'er its wheels, 
That held thy steeds erect and motionless 
As molten statues on some palace-gate, 
Shakes as with palsied age before thee now.* 

And in his " Andrea of Hungary," where Caraffa gives vent to 
his passion for what he cannot enjoy :— 

The pagan 
Who heaves up ^Etna * * 

*""'.* * is better off than I am : 

He groans upon the bed where lies his torment, 
I very far away from where lies mine.t 

And where the same speaker again avows his love for Giovanna : 

He who thinks little of such perfection, 
Has left his thoughts among the worms which creep 
In charnel-houses, among brainless skulls, 
Dry bones without a speck of blood or thread 
Of fibre, ribs that never cased a heart. 
***** 

Even rocks and stones 
Would split, if my heart's fire were pent within.]: 

In a dramatic sketch intended to reproduce the events 
connected with the deaths of Cleopatra and Antony, a subject 
more germane to his taste than the mediaeval subjects he was 
always attempting to force into Greek frames, there are some 

* Act iv., sc. i. t Act ii., sc. v. 



180 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

passages which would do credit to the Elizabethan dramatists, 
as where Gallus indicates to Caesar his preference for his native 
country : — 

Give me the banks of Arico, where young Spring, 
Who knows not half the names of her own flowers, 
Looks into Summer's eyes, and wakes him up 
Alert, and laughs at him until he lifts 
His rod of roses, and she runs away.* 

And again in his description of Cleopatra : — 

Tho' more than thrice seven years have come, and stolen 
Day after day a leaf or two of bloom, 
She has but changed her beauty ; the soft tears 
Fall, one would think, to make it bloom afresh, t 

Equally characteristic is what I may call his bust of Julius 
Caesar : — 

Well I remember that high- exalted brow, 
Those eyes of eagle under it, those lips 
At which the senate and the people stood 
Expectant for their portals to unclose ; 
Then speech, not womanly, but manly sweet, 
Came from them, and shed pleasure as the moon 



But such passages are rare ; and even were they frequent, 
still, being discontinuous, insulated, and fragmentary, uncon- 
nected with any principles of consecutive action or philosophy, 
they would not entitle their author to a high place among his 
contemporaries. 

That a writer so constituted as Landor, with fitful emotions 
and no great depth of intellect, should, like Prior, have 
amused himself with pelting bits of satire at the men and things 
which came in his way, and enshrining in verse any incident 

* " Scenes for a Study." + Idem. % Idem. 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 181 

which captivated his attention, from the fall of a fan to the 
discovery of a planet, was a matter of course. These vers de 
societe constitute the greater portion of the books entitled 
"Heroic Idyls" and the "Fruits of an Old Tree," and the 
complete portion of the work which appeared under the sin- 
gular name of " Dry Sticks Faggoted." Some of these verses, 
miscellaneous and fugitive in their nature, will bear comparison 
"with any similar effusions in the language. Occasionally we get 
the caustic irony of Swift : — 

How soon, alas ! the hours are over, 

Counted us out to play the lover ! 

And how much narrower is the stage, 

Allotted us to play the sage ! 

But when we play the fool, how wide 

The theatre expands ; beside, 

How long the audience sits before us, 

How many prompters ! what a chorus ! 

But the most numerous in the collection enshrine the fleeting 
feminine attachments which constituted the staple charm of his 
life :— 

Soon, O Ianthe ! life is o'er, 
And sooner beauty's heavenly smile : 

Kiss only, and I ask no more, 
Let love remain that little while. 

And again : — 

It often comes into my head 

That we may dream when we are dead, 

But I am far from sure we do ; 
O that it were so ! — then my rest 
Would ever be among the blest, 

For I should ever dream of you. 

But sometimes these occasional verses soar above the region 
of mere wit, and a tinge of melancholy sinks the thought deep 
into the heart, as in lines written while sitting in his room, as 
was his wont, without candles, while night was coming on : — 



182 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

My pictures blacken in their frames, 

As night comes on, 
And youthful maids and wrinkled dames 

Are now all gone. 

Death of the day ! — a sterner death 

Did worse before : 
The fairest form and balmiest breath 

Away he bore. 

And in the sorrowful lines in which he confesses his incom- 
petency to renew a past amour : — 

No, my own love of other years, 

No, it must never be ! 
Much rests with you that yet endears — 

Alas ! but what with me ? 

Could those bright years o'er me revolve 

So gay, o'er you so fair, 
The pearl of life we would dissolve, 

And each the cup might share. 

You show that truth can ne'er decay, 

Whatever fate befalls ; 
I, that the myrtle and the bay 

Shoot fresh o'er ruined walls. 

The bitterness of his feelings with regard to his private feuds 
could not be suppressed even in his address to the place, near 
Bath, which he had chosen for his last resting-place : — 

Widcombe ! few seek with thee their resting-place, 
But I, when I have run my weary race, 

Will throw my bones upon thy churchyard turf ; 
Although malignant waves on foreign shore 
Have stranded me, and I shall lift no more 

My hoary head above the hissing surf. 

But the merit of the greater portion of these pieces consists 
not so much in the novelty or beauty of the thought, as in 
melody of rhythm and aptitude of expression. Had he written 
nothing else than these, they would have earned for him a very 



CLASSICAL SCHOOL. 183 

good place among the fugitive verse writers of his language, 
but nothing more. 

Landor's true place among the poets of this century should, 
therefore, hardly rise above the boundary line which separates 
the lowest assignable division of his art. In expressing in 
verse, as a sculptor in marble, any momentary embodiment of 
passion, or a group of figures in statuesque attitudes, perhaps 
no writer has excelled Landor. But poetry has to do, not with 
fixed phases of passion, not with stereotyped forms of beauty 
limited to points of time and space, but with progressive 
development of being, which soars beyond the boundaries of 
the present, and claims past and future worlds for its province. 
The imagination which would make the fortune of an artist or a 
sculptor, would form a very poor pittance for a poet. The 
triumph of the one is confined to fixing one fleeting moment 
of existence within a certain few inches of space. He is the 
slave of the clock, and cannot get out of his private room. 
But the other drags time, with all its baggage, at his chariot- 
wheels like a conqueror, and finds illimitable space too narrow 
for his conceptions. His imagination overleaps the walls of 
creation. The universe is but a scroll in his hands. 



84 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



CHAPTER IX. 

ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 

ONE of the great features of the poetry of the eighteenth 
century was the predominance of words over thoughts, 
of style over substance, of the mere polish of language over 
the matter conveyed. Poets did not deal with topics of every- 
day life, or with those objects which new forms of civilization 
were constantly bringing into view ; but with the old themes, 
with which they had no relationship, except through the 
medium of the fancy, and which they could only clothe with 
freshness by imparting to them a new dress. Even Thomson 
cannot describe the approach of Spring without imaging her 
as a goddess descending like the nymph in a transformation 
scene, in a galaxy of roses from a cloud ; or so common a sub- 
ject as a pattering spring shower, without anticipating the style 
of Delia Crusca : — 

At last 
The clouds consign their treasures to the fields, 
And softly shaking on the dimpled pool 
Prelusive drops, let all their moisture flow- 
In large effusion o'er the feathered world. 

Cowper, who dealt with some of the commonest incidents ot 
his life, and who even did not think the knitting-needles of 
Mrs. Unwin below the subject of his muse, is more remark- 
able for the raciness and elegant force of his language than for 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 185 



the boldness of his imagination or the newness of his thoughts. 
His sphere was too confined, his intellectual horizon too 
restricted, to enable him to do more than merely point out 
the direction in which the change should be made. The 
Wartons attempted, on the other hand, to impart a new phase 
to the poetry of the epoch by an infusion of the Gothic 
element, but did really nothing more than bring fresh orna- 
ments to the treatment of the old range of subjects. Poetry 
never got further with them than Odes to Fancy, Contempla- 
tions in Solitude, Addresses to Morning, and all those subjects 
which the poet sports with in his fancy, rather than enters into 
with his heart. Burns is the only poet who sang as it were 
out of the necessities of his nature. He extended Cowper's 
realistic treatment, and sculptured all his experiences in verse. 
But from his limited culture, he only effected a reform. It 
needed men of wider range of thought, of more comprehensive 
sympathy, and more commanding eminence, to achieve a 
revolution. Wordsworth was the first writer who struck the 
balance between the naked conceptions and mere verbal 
or adventitious ornaments of poetry \ and Byron the first poet 
who actually inverted the old position of things, by showing 
how ideas may outstrip language by the very impetuosity of 
the fountain from which they have their source. On the 
shoulders of these two men, the mantle of poetry sat as the 
visible raiment of their souls ; and, perhaps, the history of any 
literature, certainly that of our own, does not present another 
instance of two contemporary bards occupying so high an 
eminence in their art, unconsciously conspiring to effect the 
same revolution, yet treading in paths so opposite to each other. 
Byron and Wordsworth, though mo sang in spheres of thought 
so divergent, were the resultants of the same forces acting upon 
different temperaments, in one direction. The French Revo- 
lution had taught inquiring minds to examine into everything, 
and irreverent minds to obey the ruling impulse of the hour, 
with a blind fanaticism. The mere babyism of literature, the 



1 86 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

display of tinsel decorations without spiritual substance, could 
no longer be endured. Wordsworth entered upon his new 
mission with a strong moral will, every thought repugnant to 
which was only called up to receive merited castigation ; 
Byron, with an intensity of passion which could brook no 
restraint, and which was the more indulged, because he felt the 
rottenness and insincerity of most of the barriers which society 
opposed to its gratification. The muse of Wordsworth found 
a home in sounding the depths of philosophy, in unveiling the 
analogies which bind the material and the spiritual universe into 
one system ; that of Byron, in laying bare the intricate mazes 
of the feelings, in fathoming the darker recesses of the human 
heart, in displaying nature in its grandest energies, whether as 
imaged in the sea-storm and mountain tempest, or in the 
tumults of the soul, aroused from its lethargies by the allure- 
ments of heroic enterprise or passionate guilt. Society, to 
Wordsworth, was governed by recondite moral laws ; to Byron, 
it was the sport of chance. Wordsworth saw in the physical 
universe the temple of the soul, with all things munificently 
arranged therein for its security and happiness. Byron, though 
acknowledging in the material world certain fixed laws, saw 
little relationship in these laws to man, beyond the product of 
a large amount of discomfort and misery. Wordsworth in- 
veighed against human institutions, as the only fount of the 
evils which afflicted society. Byron went considerably further, 
including nature in the record, and carrying the arraignment 
up to the throne of God Himself. 

It is, however, in relation to Christianity that the intellectual 
discrepancy of the two men is most apparent. Wordsworth 
regarded the religious institutions of the country as the very ark 
of humanity ; Byron, as mere spiritual shams, rather obstacles to 
be removed than levers to help men forward in their progressive 
course to a nobler future. Wordsworth believed in rites and for- 
mularies as the outer embodiments of the Christian spirit ; Byron 
seems to have believed that such spirit was dead, and that its 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 187 

rites and formularies were encumbering ground which ought to 
be taken up with new creations, more germane to that universal 
brotherhood of love which such formularies tended rather to 
extinguish than develope. Wordsworth appeared to think that 
creeds should be estimated by the quantity of abstract or absolute 
truth they conveyed ; Byron, by their fitness to the wants of the 
epoch : 

Religions die out every thousand years, 

Or need a new refreshment from the spheres. 

Both held that the outer universe partook in a large degree of 
the effulgence, if not of the nature, of the Divinity. But 
Wordsworth expressly maintained that the human soul, pure 
at its birth, encountered no temptations to evil but those from 
without j while Byron regarded it as smitten with disease in 
its source, and subject to internal impulses to crime which 
it could not resist. It is singular that Wordsworth, though so 
persistent a supporter of Christian formularies, should have 
entertained convictions diametrically at war with them \ while 
Byron, who repudiated such formularies, held opinions which 
to a great extent afforded them a dogmatic basis ! 

There cannot, I think, be a doubt that the field of Byron's 
triumphs was much more adapted to the spirit of poetry than 
that chosen by Wordsworth, since the sphere of passion breathing 
the sentiments of the heart, is more capable of being idealized . 
than that of reflection, the province of the brain. Nor can there, 
I think, be a doubt that Byron displayed in his higher poetical 
sphere, his superiority to Wordsworth in the limited province 
within which that poet confined himself. Had Byron in the 
treatments of his subjects only equalled Wordsworth, he must 
have evinced greater powers than his contemporary, as his was a 
higher range of art. But Byron's superiority is evinced by the 
fact that he frequently combines passion with grand bursts of 
reflection, while Wordsworth never disturbs the limpid stream 
of reflection by grand bursts of passion. In "The Excursion" 
it would be impossible to produce a line which conveys, with the 



1 88 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

rapidity of a conductor, electric shocks of feeling to the depths 
of the heart. But " Childe Harold," while crowded with such 
passages, exhibits in the last two cantos as much psychological 
analysis as would furnish a very good chapter of metaphysics. 
The commanding powers of Byron led him through a much wider 
range of subjects than Wordsworth, and enabled him to obtain 
superior excellence in all. Satire was so alien to Wordsworth's 
nature that he was utterly incapacitated from attempting it ; but 
satire was a department in which Byron excelled. Wordsworth 
only tried his hand at one narrative poem, which has the unlucky 
distinction of being the worst in the language ; * Byron wrote 
several, and nearly all of first-class excellence. Wordsworth wrote 
only one play, which has never been acted, and which no one 
cares to read ; Byron wrote many, which, though only of second- 
rate merit, had, and still possess, a certain amount of popularity. 
In lyrical poetry, the comparison is still more to the disadvan- 
tage of Wordsworth, who can hardly be said to have tried this 
department of his art, in which Byron covered himself with 
glory. In the sonnet and reflective poem, I confess Words- 
worth's superiority j but these belong to a lower range of art than 
the narrative, the lyrical, and dramatic sphere, in which Byron 
infinitely distanced his competitor. As reflective poets, the 
difference between Byron and Wordsworth, to the advantage of 
the latter, is not half so great as the difference between them, 
to the advantage of the former, in any of the departments in 
which Byron pre-eminently excelled. That difference appears 
to me to consist in this : that, whereas the reflections of Byron's 
hero are desultory, springing out of the country which Harold 
visits, and the scenery and monuments with which he is brought 
in contact, those of Wordsworth's heroes are systematic and 
introspective — the principles expounded deriving their elucida- 
tion rather from the general world of man than from the narrow 
specifications of time and place. Wordsworth's reflections are the 
product of the mind reposing on the heights of abstract thought, 

* "The White Doe of Rylstone."- 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 189 

descending occasionally for illustration among the range of 
material phenomena, upon which it habitually looks as from a 
lofty eminence ; those of Byron have their mainspring in mate- 
rial phenomena, though their flights are often so Titanic as 
to seem to touch the threshold of heaven. They are, taken 
singly, in point of artistic finish and glowing beauty, grander 
than anything of a similar character in Wordsworth. But when 
we consider their straggling nature, and their utter want of sub- 
servience to a moral aim, the superiority of his rival becomes 
manifest. Wordsworth moves through the regions of specula- 
tion self-supporting, with his thoughts revolving on their own 
axis, shaping his course with a fixed design, regulated by the 
attraction of the moral law ; Byron, like a meteor which fre- 
quently returns to its volcanic source to be replenished with 
light, but shedding a far fuller though a more erratic blaze than 
his contemporary. But there are so many inconsistencies in 
Wordsworth, he is so prolix, he pins his faith to so many obso- 
lete institutions, believes in so many exploded fallacies, that 
his system of concatenated thought loses much of its ex- 
cellence even as a work of art ; while the dashing vigour of 
Byron, the intensity of force arising from his concentrated 
earnestness, his absolute freedom from the fetters of prejudice, 
his manner of allying feeling with reflection, of illuminating his 
subjects rather with the flashes of wit than with the slower 
processes of the reason, — all these go far to make up for the 
disjointed and fragmentary nature of his reflections, which the 
structure of his poem, no less than that of his own mental consti- 
tution, imposed upon him. For Byron appears to have been 
incapable of digesting his thoughts into a system upon any 
subject. So far, his inferiority to Wordsworth is immense. 
Could he have done so, his poetic illustration of his principles 
would have surpassed even that of his rival. This, however, 
is the province of the reason preparing the ground for the 
poet, rather than that of the poet himself. And in all the 
essential constituents of poetry, apart from its moral end and 



^=^=^-^ ._ >W— ^*^WM 



190 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

aesthetic completeness, " Childe Harold " need not fear com- 
parison with "The Excursion." But " Childe Harold " is by 
no means the most eminent of Byron's productions in the same 
sense in which " The Excursion " is the first of Wordsworth's 
productions. Had Byron written nothing else than this poem, 
he would have been entitled to a place in the same group as 
Wordsworth, if not upon a higher seat. For no meditative 
poem, deriving its topics from an objective source, ever 
accomplished half so much. The hero is brought in contact 
with every scene which suggests the most stirring events of the 
antique and modern world, and the cast of his thoughts 
impart even dignity to the ennobling associations he recalls. 
The sublimity of Swiss scenery, illumined by the genius of the 
men who from its quiet recesses revolutionized the spirit of 
modern society ; the proud chivalry of Spain, peeping, like a 
landscape behind ruins, through the vista of moral debasement ; 
the classical sternness of Greece rebuking from her broken 
Parthenon and rifled Theseus the fantastic barbarism of her 
invaders ; the solemn grandeur of Rome mocked by the 
triumphs of Christian art ; the festivities of Venice associating 
the glories of the middle ages with modern degeneracy ; — all 
these are mirrored forth in the poet's mind with such distinct- 
ness as to make the pigmy features of the present fade before 
the mighty phases of the past, and bring those aspects of 
humanity nearest to us which are most worthy of being re- 
membered. The fourth canto of " Childe Harold," for what it 
accomplishes in so small a compass, is indeed a marvel of art 
unapproached and unapproachable in its abstract grandeur, 
like that gigantic power the poet attempts to reconstruct, and 
from the ruins of which he derives his text for the instruction 
of the nations. For Byron, in this canto, not only etherealizes 
some of the most bewitching scenery of Italy, till it assumes 
the hues of a crystalline landscape, — he not only untombs the 
ancient crowds of the Capitol, and bids them live again, surging 
round the forum of the tribune, or awakening with their shouts 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 191 

the sleeping recesses of the Flavian amphitheatre, — he not 
only invests every phase of that commonwealth which con- 
quered the world, with a freshness, as if it were present, and 
with an ideality which retains the material in subservience to 
its spiritual aspects ; but the poet lays bare with the dissecting- 
knife of the psychologist all those laws of the mind by which 
these wonders are accomplished. In this canto Byron is 
poet, philosopher, historian, artist, moralist, antiquarian, and 
metaphysician. The soul is thrown back upon itself, its 
spiritual recesses explored, and the occult links revealed by 
which external objects arouse its passions or absorb its sympa- 
thies. When he turns to the objective world, with what power 
does he strike off in a few lines the spiritual features of Greek 
art, steeping the productions of the genius of antiquity in the 
glowing colours of his own mind, until they appear invested 
with new splendour : — 

There, too, the Goddess loves in stone, and fills 
The air around with beauty ; we inhale 
The ambrosial aspect, which, beheld, instils 
Part of its immortality ; the veil 
Of heaven is half undrawn ; within the pale 
We stand, and in that form and face behold 
What Mind can make, when Nature's self would fail ; 
And to the fond idolaters of old 
Envy the innate flash which such a soul could mould : 

We gaze and turn away, and know not where, 
Dazzled and drunk with beauty. * 

* # * * * * 

Appear'dst thou not to Paris in this guise ? 
Or to more deeply-blest Anchises ? or, 
In all thy perfect goddess-ship, when lies 
Before thee thy own vanquished Lord of War, 
And gazing in thy face as toward a star, 
Laid on thy lap, his eyes to thee upturn, 
Feeding on thy sweet cheek ! while thy lips are 
With lava kisses melting while they burn, 
Showered on his eyelids, brow, and mouth, as from an urn ! 



SS99SSSBS 



192 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Glowing, and circumfused in speechless love, 
Their full divinity inadequate 
That feeling to express, or to improve, 
The gods become as mortals, and man's fate 
Has moments like their brightest ; but the weight 
Of earth recoils upon us ; — let it go ! 
We can recall such visions, and create, 
From what has been, or might be, things which grow 
Into thy statue's form, and look like gods below. * 

The conceptions of the sculptor are here again moulded into 
language with the same force as they are expressed in stone : — 

Or, turning to the Vatican, go see 
Laocoon's torture dignifying pain — 
A father's love and mortal's agony 
With an immortal's patience blending ; — vain 
The struggle ; vain, against the coiling strain 
And gripe, and deepening of the dragon's grasp, 
The old man's clench ; the long envenomed chain 
Rivets the living links, — the enormous asp 
Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp. 

Or view the lord of the unerring bow, 
The god of life, and poesy, and light — 
The Sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow 
All radiant from his triumph in the fight ; 
The shaft has just been shot — the arrow bright 
With an immortal's vengeance ; in his eye 
And nostril beautiful disdain, and might, 
And majesty, flash their full lightnings by, 
Developing in that one glance the Deity. 

But in his delicate form — a dream of love, 
Shaped by some solitary nymph, whose breast 
Long'd for a deathless lover from above, 
And maddened in that vision — are expressed 
All that ideal beauty ever blessed 
The mind with in its most unearthly mood, 
When each conception was a heavenly guest — 

* C. iv., sts. 49 — 52. 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 193 

A ray of immortality — and stood, 
Starlike, around, until they gathered to a god ! * 

After familiarizing us with the grandest organism in the 
world of man, he confronts us with the grandest element in 
the world of nature. The ocean has always been a familiar 
theme with poets, but surely none has ever risen to the full 
height of the subject like Lord Byron. It is hardly too much 
to say, that if the grandeur and dignity of Rome derives 
increased state and dignity when reflected in the glowing 
depths of his mind, the sublimity of the ocean derives 
renewed force from the grandeur of the images with which he 
has invested it : — 

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form,' 
Glasses itself in tempests ! * * * 

The image of Eternity — the throne 
Of the Invisible ; even out of thy slime 
The monsters of the deep are made ; each zone 
Obeys thee * * * 

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls 
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake, 
And monarchs tremble in their capitals, 
The oak leviathans, * * * 

These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake, 
They melt into thy yeast of waves. 

The majesty of Rome among civic structures, as the sublimity 
of the ocean among earthly elements, is supreme, but Byron 
has surrounded both with the grandeur of genius which is 
superior to either. 

There are poets, first-class in their own department, who are 
not, and never could become, representative poets in any wide 
sense. Wordsworth could never represent anything out of 
himself. He seldom gives us the properties of anything he 

* C. iv., sts. 160 — 2. 

13 



194 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

describes, but only his own way of looking at it. And even of 
representative poets in a wider sense, some, like Scott, can only 
represent a peculiar section of the past, and others, like Crabbe, 
a peculiar feature of the present. They apply their minds to 
master the groundwork of some segment of humanity, they 
study the upholstery of their subject, and achieve their results 
as much by the force of talent as by the strokes of genius. 
But Byron is a representative poet in the highest sense. He 
is a more general representative poet of the past than Scott, 
and a far wider representative poet of the present than Crabbe ; 
in fact, he is a representative poet in the same sense as 
Shakespeare was a representative poet, for he represents the 
past as well as the present, not indeed any partial cutting, but 
the whole structure of the age he would describe from copestone 
to base, the sorrows as well as the joys, the laughter and the 
groans of fleeting generations. In "Werner," we have Germany 
staggering under the blows of the Thirty Years' war ; in 
"Marino Faliero," the pride of the Italian republic; in "The 
Two Foscari," the bloody factions of Venice; in "Sardanapalus," 
Nineveh tottering in the lap of effeminacy; in "Childe Harold,'' 
Rome stereotyped in all the splendour of her prime, just as the 
juicy succulence of her prosperity was mellowing into the first 
tinge of decay. I readily allow that his dramatic delineations 
are of an inferior order of merit, just as some of the historical 
plays of Shakespeare are of an inferior order of merit. But if 
Byron is beneath many of his rivals in depicting the past, he 
is superior to any in depicting the present ; for no poet has left 
behind so faithful and general a portraiture of the lineaments 
of his age as that which Byron has drawn of the nineteenth 
century in " Don Juan." 

Chaucer was a representative poet, but he only represented 
the state of English society contemporary with himself. 
Dante was a representative poet, but t he only represented the 
religious aspects of his age. Spenser and Ariosto were repre- 
sentative poets, but only of mediaeval chivalry. Byron is 



»~»W" ..-■-UP... ... PI l- PUB . .. -m W. -. ■_..!-.. ■■ Mjjp. ,«l »-<|P^^^^M(M| 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 195 

indeed the only one of the class who has extended his canvas 
over so broad an area as to embrace in one picture the manners 
of various countries, and of conflicting civilizations : Russia, 
Turkey, Greece, Spain, England, succeed each other in this 
wonderful panorama, with the habits and courts of their people 
so faithfully sketched, that the portraiture bears all the stamp 
of living reality. Shipwrecks, land sieges and battles, political 
intrigues, harem strifes, piratical adventures, feminine coteries, 
love-making without end, fashionable parties, states' embassies, 
parliamentary ambitions, are each treated in a tone ever 
changing from grave to gay, facetious banter giving place to 
biting ridicule, and both alike alternating with exquisite pathos 
and deep philosophical reflection, till it is really difficult to deter- 
mine which spirit most prevails, the mocking satire of Swift, the 
quiet raillery of Steele, the deep reflection of Young, the gushing 
tenderness of Rousseau, or the grave morality of Johnson. The 
powers of the poet are not less diversified than the scenes and 
characters he describes, though these are of every imaginable 
order. Wherever we move, the stage is always crowded with 
figures so distinct and palpable, that, though the creatures of 
the poet's brain, we firmly believe they have their prototypes 
in the real world around us. For they manifest the same 
selfishness, the same scepticism, the same voluptuousness, 
the same ardent spirit of inquiry, and the same reckless 
adventure which moulds the souls or directs the energies 
of most of the actors in the nineteenth century. The 
poet has really held his mirror up to nature — shown 
"vice her own deformity, virtue her own image, and every 
circumstance and habit of the time its form and pres- 
sure." We hardly know which to admire most, that cordial 
sympathy with which he enters into every condition and rank 
of life, that world-embracing instinct for the sesthetic and the 
true, under every sky, to which his conceptions owe much 
of their inborn fire and energy, or the spontaneous burst of 
classical language, unsurpassed for its chaste vigour and flexile 



196 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

sinuosity of strength, in which those conceptions are enshrined. 
In reading Spenser, we never get out of the world of 
ideality and romance. He never impresses us with the 
reality of his conceptions, and though there is music in 
his swelling cadences of the loftiest kind, and diversity in 
his characters, it is a music and diversity which repeat them- 
selves in one unvarying round. But Byron is ever passing with 
untired wing from the world of imagination to the world of fact, 
equally supreme in both spheres; and when the last symphony 
dies away, or the previous actors disappear, it is only to give pro- 
minence to still more novel combinations of the ideal and the 
actual. I do not, therefore, think the critic will be far wrong 
in placing " Don Juan" on the topmost shelf of English litera- 
ture, as the grandest representative poem in any language. I feel 
sure, if Englishmen were asked to select which of their literary 
treasures they would place first in order, the choice would fall 
on four or five of the leading dramas of Shakespeare ; and 
if pressed to point out which they would select next, that 
work would be "Paradise Lost;" but I feel as sure, if their 
selection was put to a third proof, their choice would fall on 
" Don Juan." 

To urge the incompleteness of" Don Juan " as a defect would 
be pre-eminently unfair, as it was evidently a work in progress, 
and the four cantos which Byron wrote in Greece were destroyed 
for fear of wounding the fashionable susceptibilities in whose 
flesh the shafts of his ridicule had most rankled.* If the poem 
is purposeless, so far is it true to the age it would represent. 

* The fearful Vandalism of this act, as well as the destruction of the 
Memoirs, in consenting to which Moore displayed his usual cringing sub- 
servience to aristocratic influence, is not paralleled in literary history. Can 
any one contemplate without indignation the chef-d'oeuvre of one of the 
first geniuses of any age or country ruthlessly truncated, and posterity thus 
cheated out of one of its chief treasures, in order that the cream of Lord 
XL's equanimity may not be ruffled, or Lady K.'s singular notions of 
propriety may be supported before the world? 



mm^mmmmB*^**fv.9.- ■'■■•". 9 ■ ■ ■ "- |J ' - •■ 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 197 

For what era could be more aimless than the first quarter of 
the nineteenth century ? The Napoleonic wars had just been 
concluded, without settling, and without being intended to 
settle, anything. The English nation had been fooled into 
spending its best blood, and taxing the energies of myriads 
yet unborn with hundreds of millions of debt, simply for the 
extinction of one man. Could anything have been more cruelly 
purposeless than that ? No spiritual results had been achieved, 
or indeed so much as aimed at. The highest embodiments of 
statesmanship were beheld in the Percevals, and the Castle- 
reaghs, under whom was carried out the great political juggle 
of the time — the union of England and Ireland, which was 
supposed to be consummated by the exclusion of nearly the 
whole of her population from the commonest civil rights. The 
high-road of national inquiry ended everywhere in the quag- 
mire of scepticism. Nothing was valued except money, nothing 
appreciated save pleasure, nothing believed in but success. 
Those grand iron pathways, yoking steam and fire to the 
subservience of man's higher destinies, those electric nerves 
flashing his intelligence under seas, and making the impulses 
of his will felt almost as soon as they were conceived, at the 
antipodes, by which the century has done much to redeem its 
lack of soul, and spiritual remissness, had not arisen. The 
moral laxity inspired by a protracted war had flung back the 
energies of the soul, in the absence of any other vent, upon 
sensuous enjoyments, and the coarsest of these were covered by 
the thin gauze of conventional propriety, which often presented 
vice in the garb of religion. To reflect all these inconsistencies, 
the bard must pursue a course equally erratic with that of the 
age which he describes. He must appear to have no design 
beyond what momentary impulse inspires ; he must launch his 
hero, as it were, upon the wave of chance, and make him the 
victim of the chapter of accidents, the product of an age which 
seems to have lost all belief in the control of a superintending 
Providence. 



198 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

But in reality, so far is " Don Juan " from being purposeless, 
that under its seemingly erratic surface there lies an object of 
grand significance. The aim of this poem is to unmask hypo- 
crisy, to silence superstition, to dethrone the popular idols and 
the spiritual shams so grossly misleading the people of the day. 
The object of the poet was to turn a shallow world inside-out, to 
show the social weaknesses lurking behind its apparent strength, 
and occasionally to electrify it by glimpses into the infinite depths 
of the spiritual element of which it was only an empty bubble on 
the surface. If here a ghostly pretension was exposed, if there 
a political blunder was laughed out of countenance, — if in one 
place he transfixed with his shaft the heartlessness of pompous 
conventionality turning poor human nature shivering out of 
doors, if in another he derides dogmatic formularies which kill 
the Christian spirit, of which they affect to be the living exponent, 
— all this was only to array in more attractive colours the 
sublimities of man's spiritual nature, and the grandeur of the 
outer universe beating in symphony with it, a combination of 
glory upon which God had set His seal, revealing in its effulgent 
hieroglyphs the high destinies to which man might aspire, could 
he read his own nature aright, and not be deluded by the 
wretched scrawls blurred over the divine page by prejudice and 
custom. Byron does not propound, or appear himself to have 
formed, any systematic notion of the revelation in the palimp- 
sest ; but by erasing the absurdities on the surface, here and 
there, we get flashes of meaning glittering underneath, which 
shed a baleful glare on the delusions above, as the marble 
pavement of a Roman bath, when exhumed from the rubbish of 
centuries, reflects a broader light upon the barbarisms by which 
it has been concealed. It is these startling contrasts between 
the loftier yearnings of man's nature and the hollow mockeries 
of society which constitute alike the object and the charm 
of " Don Juan." The poet never destroys except to reveal. The 
outer frivolities of the poem are only a vehicle for the deepest 
earnestness wherewith the poet arraigns the institutions of his 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 199 

age, and would make their misshapen materials but the stepping- 
stones on which men might rise to higher things. 

The charge of immorality alleged against this noble poem 
seems to me to be founded on a wrong notion of art, which 
in its representative character is bound to reflect all the 
features of its subject. It would be trite at this time of day 
to assert that all unchaste painting must be regarded from 
the object in view, and if this be not to excite lascivious ideas, 
but to present human nature in all its aspects, the picture is 
clearly justifiable. But people who deride conventual notions 
in real life, do not scruple to espouse such notions with zealous 
enthusiasm when they enter into the domain of art. Instead of 
making that domain include the whole of the actual and infinite 
existences beyond, they would restrict its functions to the 
representation of such bleak natures as never wandered beyond 
the walls of gloomy asceticism. If in artistic representation, 
passion is to be struck out of the heart of man, and he is to be 
depicted in no scenes except where he is the willing instrument 
of the virtues or the mere automaton of the intellect, there 
must be an end of artistic representation altogether; for 
nothing indeed would then be represented as it is, but every- 
thing as it is not. It is not for the poet, to assume the gown 
and bands of the moral preacher, when he delineates vice ; nor 
ought he to dwell any longer on the lascivious than is sufficient 
for the truthfulness of the representation, or to make such 
pictures more frequent than is required for the faithful 
portraiture of his subject. Now Byron was too consummate 
an artist to overstep the boundaries of nature in any of these 
particulars, and in the loosest of his pictures he never stoops to 
those obscene expressions of which we find so many examples 
in the Elizabethan dramatists, the Georgian novelists, and 
Leonine poets, although his age cloaked a far greater amount 
of vice under a deeper garb of sanctity. If the poet, true to the 
representative character of his poem, laid bare the disguise 
with too rude a hand, he is no more on that account to be 



200 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

denounced as immoral, than Shakespeare is to be stigmatized 
as immoral for the songs he puts into the mouth of Ophelia, or 
the picture of lechery he displays in the loves of Edgar, or for 
the loose language he puts into the mouth of Iago in the 
opening scenes of " Othello/' or of Lucio in the closing scenes 
of " Measure for Measure." The aim of both was the exhibition 
of human nature in all its aspects, — to give us actual men and 
women, not the aspirations of angels mingled with the quint- 
essence of brutes, not the monstrous abortions of Southey, with 
all the vices arrayed in one group of characters and all the 
virtues in the other. But Shakespeare never alludes to the 
religious features of his subject without the greatest reverence. 
The privilege is, therefore, extended to him of being as unchaste 
as the nature of his subject required; whereas Byron, on 
account of his slighting treatment of religious dogmas, is not 
allowed to undrape a neck or an ankle without being assailed 
with a cry of indignant remonstrance. 

Considering Byron as the poet of passion in its intensest sense, 
considering that there is hardly a poem of any magnitude he ever 
wrote in which he does not depict love in its most fiery moods, 
surging the depths of the heart like volcanic lava, and shatter- 
ing in its throes the restraints of conscience and the sovereignty 
of the reason ; considering, likewise, the temptations of a mind 
unfettered by religious influences or social restraints, to overleap 
the boundaries of propriety, it is really wonderful that the poet 
has thrown so much of his immortal nature into his delineations, 
that he has succeeded far more powerfully than any other bard 
in steeping this fiery quintessence of dust in such ethereal light 
that, though employed upon objects of earth, it seems part of 
that fire which Prometheus filched from heaven. This is, per- 
haps, the most characteristic proof that the poet has given us 
of his grand powers : that, while treating love in its most sen- 
suous aspects, he has so etherealized the passion as to submerge 
the corporeal in the spiritual element ; so that we get all the 
charms of material enjoyment, lit up by the splendours of the 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 201 

ideal world. Love in the pages of Beaumont and Fletcher, or 
of Farquhar and Congreve, is a body without soul • love in 
the pages of Crashaw or More is a soul without body ; but love 
in the pages of Byron is that union of both which makes the 
soul the predominating feature, casting over the fires of its 
corporeal agent that witchery of colour which leaves them 
all their vigour while it deprives them of all their coarseness. 
The loves in "Lara" and " Conrad " are of an illegitimate 
character ; but . the fervour is so intense, the mutual interlacing 
of passion is so spiritual, that we feel the body is but the passive 
agent of the soul, imparting to it the dead aliment which 
feeds the flame with undying lustre. It is sufficient to recall 
what Camoens did with his island in the African waters, though 
his lovers were chivalric seamen and ideal nymphs, and what 
Byron did with his island in the South Seas, though his lovers 
were bluff English sailors and the sensuous daughters of Ota- 
heite, to prove that Byron could etherealize the most sensuous 
subject, and that the spiritual features of love were those which 
most dominated his soul. The picture in which we would expect 
the most refinement has all the coarseness of a Wapping casino; 
the other, in which we would expect to meet with the roughest 
sensuality, has all the refinement of a group by Titian. The 
fact is that the most licentious passion, in Byron's serious deli- 
neations, assumes an ethereal flush which makes the material 
element, even in its conquest over the higher powers of the 
soul, partake of that soul's glorified nature, dispersed though it 
be in fragmentary gleams ; somewhat like those conquerors who 
have subjugated a country, only in turn to become the willing 
slaves of those arts and laws they had shattered into ruin. For all 
Byron's graver heroes, in their wildest of moods, lean only on one 
breast. Theirs is an intensity of passion for one object which 
defies time, or absence, or a multiplied surfeit of beauty, to 
work any change except that of increased adoration for the form 
with whose destiny their own is inseparably entwined. One 
tithe of such devotion would make married life a paradise. 



202 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Byron carries into the heart of what society deems the irregular 
passions such fervour of spirit, and intensity of affection, as to 
make his love burn with a light of unquenched ardour to which 
the flames of conjugal affection are tame in comparison, and of 
which, if society furnished us with more examples, the stigmas 
so undeservedly applied to this feature of Lord Byron's poetry 
would be less inconsistent. If he has sinned in anything, it is 
in imparting to these attachments the durability and persistency 
of the virtues. He has thrown around the wild fevers of un- 
restrained love far more ethereal drapery, far loftier chastity of 
colouring than the most strait-laced poets impart to the tamer 
delineations of domestic felicity. The passions of his heroes 
partake of the infinite. Their yearnings are never cloyed, but 
increase in intensity as they experience repletion, because they 
spring from the soul, whose longings after beauty are as unsa- 
lable as its cravings for the divine source from which it derives 
its birth. 

Could Byron have grasped the ramifications of a compre- 
hensive plot, could he have imparted symmetry of design to 
miscellaneous materials arising out of the development of united 
action, he might have surpassed Milton. Could he, in addition, 
have created characters with grand spiritual physiognomies 
evolved out of the incidents, and not merely panelled into the 
descriptions of his pieces, he might have equalled Shakespeare. 
But these were qualities in which Byron was most deficient. As 
he lacked the power of systematizing his thoughts, he was 
equally incompetent to melt down a mass of heterogeneous 
materials in the crucible of his brain, and evolve therefrom 
some great design, breathing throughout the romantic variety 
and symmetrical proportion of its parts the grand unity of 
the whole. The cantos of " Don Juan " are only connected 
by the thread of the hero's name, which if we sever, all the 
incidents, like so many beads on a string, would fall asunder 
into so many pieces of isolated adventure. " Childe Harold " has 
not even the poor advantage of this slender ligament ; for in 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 203 

the first two cantos the hero is regarded as quite distinct from, 
the writer, and in the last two he is confounded with himself. 
So in his dramas he seldom strays out of the framework 
presented to him by history. He appears to have early felt the 
lack of constructive powers in his purely narrative poems, and 
to have thrown all his subsequent energies upon meditation and 
description. The outline of the mutiny story is just what an ordi- 
nary reader fresh from Bligh's narrative would have conceived. 
The "Giaour" and the "Bride of Abydos," the poet's first at- 
tempts at the concoction of anything like a plot, are perhaps the 
worst constructed tales in any language. In the " Corsair " and 
" Lara " he succeeds much better. But these poems, magnificent 
as the Herculean torso in their incompleteness, are still only 
fragments. They have no beginning; they are without an 
end. The marvel is that Byron, without any sustained interest 
arising out of the development of his plot, and with so little to 
satisfy the reader in the denouement of his stories, should have 
exercised such a spell over the sensational world. 

Byron is more happy with his characters than his plots, 
though here his success is very limited owing to the lack of 
variety, and his constitutional tendency to paint nature on the 
darker side. In the coxcombry of his youth, when surrounded 
by the gaieties of London society, he delighted to affect the 
mysterious misanthrope, half pirate and half noble, who reeked 
his hatred upon men by deeds of rapine and violence, and 
evinced his love for women by seducing men's daughters, 
or running away with their wives. Conrad, Alp, Lara, 
Hafid, and Selim are only so many modifications of this 
character, differing in some particulars, but all evidently 
belonging to one family, as so many representatives of the 
frame of mind in which he loved to indulge. In his incidental 
characters, Byron was to some extent coerced to go out of 
himself, and realize his conceptions in the broad field of 
nature. Lambro, Juan, Don Pedro, Johnson, and Suwarrow 
are all creations of lifelike force, imparting a rich diversity of 



^ 



204 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

colouring to the ' narrative they enliven by their vigour. His 
Cain and Lucifer belong to the same group of portraits as 
Milton's, stripped only of that terrific grandeur which dazzles 
while it oppresses the imagination. In " The Island," the bluff 
qualities of Ben Bunting and Jack Skyscrape are well con- 
trasted with the thoughtful effeminacy of Torquil and the hardy 
nature of the rebellious mutineer. It would seem, then, that 
the poet's domestic quarrels, which drove him from the bosom 
of English society, shook out of his nature so much of that 
cynical affectation as led him in the early stage of his career to 
identify himself with proscribed outlaws, and paint humanity 
from its worst models. It is one of the strange inconsistencies 
of Byron's character, that while petted and feted in society, 
the only heroes he could paint were cynical pirates who set all 
its laws at defiance ; and that it was only when society cast 
him from its bosom, his heart appeared to open to the genial 
influence of its customs, and he painted men not so much from 
the monstrous conceits of his imagination, as from the standards 
of nature. 

I do not, however, think that Byron could portray any mas- 
culine character, in which his own feelings were not profoundly 
interested, with such force as to make it a gallery picture worthy 
of being ranked in the same class with Shakespeare's, or even 
with Sir Walter Scott's. There was too much of the cynic in 
his nature to allow him to enter into characters foreign to his 
own with such hearty sympathy as to see everything from 
their own point of view, and thus, as it were, from the bases 
of their nature to allow the peculiarities of his heroes to spring 
out of the action of circumstances upon the combination of 
two or three radical principles. This defect is most con- 
spicuous in his dramas, where his characters rather declaim 
than act, where they impress their mental features on the 
spectators by set speeches rather than by dealing with the 
course of events. In his feminine embodiments, Byron's re- 
pulsive egotism did not stand in the way, and the consequence 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 205 

is a group of female portraits not surpassed in their diversity 
of form and freshness of colour by anything out of dramatic 
art. Zuleika is all tenderness, Gulbeyaz all fire, Gulnare a com- 
bination of both. In Haidee, we have the guileless affections 
of a young Greek islander developed without the fetters of 
religious restraint; in Donna Julia, the criminal passion of 
the matron setting such restraint at defiance. Adeline is a 
type of the women of ton, with no qualities but such as 
sparkle in the eyes of society. Medora is a type of a woman 
who has sacrificed society to an affection which swallows up 
her entire being. Dudu and Aurora Raby are admirable illus- 
trations of those feminine natures which combine abyssmal 
depths of feeling under the quietest Quaker exterior, but the 
one chastened by Christian feeling, the other sensualized by 
the voluptuousness of the East. In these portraits we have 
a mixture of goodness and evil, but the goodness most pre- 
dominates. Had Byron painted men as he drew women, his 
hold upon human sympathies would be far more general. But 
the blighting cynicism of his nature, which marred his mascu- 
line creations, was not always kept in check by his passion for 
beauty, or by that impassioned spirit of chivalry which arises 
out of devotion to the other sex; for the poet seldom loses 
an opportunity of jesting at their passions, and turning their 
foibles into ridicule. Even here, his uncontrollable habit of 
satirizing human weakness prevented him from manifesting 
that hearty sympathy with his object, so essential to place 
conceptions of feminine loveliness among the loftiest types of 
ideal creation. 

It is owing to this cynical spirit in Byron, arising out of 
perverted views of humanity, that is to be ascribed much of 
that mocking spirit which pervades a large portion of his works, 
and which hindered him from going out of himself, and com- 
pletely sinking his own idiosyncrasies in the characters he 
created for others. The feeling which led him to dethrone 
man from his natural position as the crowning feature of this 



2 o6 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

planet, induced him to set himself up as the spirit in whose 
centre all the conflicting lines of the universe seem to meet. 
The mistake of exalting the powers of evil over those of good, 
the casualties of chance over the laws of design, was hardly 
surpassed by thrusting his own petty interests in front of those 
of general humanity. It was from these two fountains that 
most of those waters of bitterness flow which corrode all the 
conceptions of Byron, which destroy their moral aim, and 
which prevent him from surrounding humanity with those 
attributes of sweetness, arising out of the harmonious develop- 
ment of its faculties. He could not represent man reposing 
on the basis of his moral nature, who believed him to be the 
victim of demoniac influences, or the sport of blind chance. 
That egotism which made him regard self as the be-all and the 
end-all here, forced him to intrude his narrow subjectivity into 
most of his works, and circumscribe within its limits all the 
range of his creations. We turn over all his pages in vain for 
an adequate representation of the dignity of man, or the 
angelic purity of woman. If we are treated to the develop- 
ment of any virtue, such as courage, or hardihood, or con- 
stancy of affection, it is as furthering the perpetration of some 
crime which narrows the sensibilities of our nature. Double 
murder, incest, adultery, incendiarism, piratical violence, 
treasons, — such are the subjects which the poet has chosen 
to surround with the magic of his genius, and to invest their 
perpetrators with all those brilliant qualities which show that, 
if he did not actually intend them as models to follow, he 
certainly designed them to provoke our admiration. The con- 
sequence is that man is not represented in his natural position 
as fitting into the universe of things, but as wrenched out of 
his sphere, and in conflict with all the elements around him. 
Turbid misanthropy, the state of feverish excitement in which 
he lived, his reckless spirit of self-assertion, the feeling of hos- 
tility he manifested to the institutions with which he was 
brought into contact, are reflected in all his meditations, colour 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 207 

all his views, are more or less conspicuous in every character 
he conceived and every picture which he drew. Of the world 
of quiet human nature behind those factitious storms and tem- 
pests, into which Wordsworth dropped the plummet of his 
thoughts, and out of which Shakespeare evoked so many 
divine lineaments, Byron appears to have known little, and 
cared less. The unquiet passions in the heart of which he 
made his home, shut him out from the circle of the domestic 
affections, and from some of the most interesting features 
of the social world. They hindered him from realizing the 
mysterious harmonies between the different faculties of the 
soul, acting in concert with each other, and the still deeper 
sympathies in the material universe which exhibit natural 
phenomena, co-operating together to achieve certain fixed 
objects by an instinct as divine or more unerring than that in 
man. Byron, in fact, saw no purpose in the universal fitness 
of things. The world to him was objectless. Ruin might 
drive its ploughshare over creation without leaving things 
much worse than they are. As the universe, so were his works, 
without an object. They evince no unity of purpose, no moral 
design. His heroes, like the phenomena of the material world, 
appear to be driven about very much the sport of blind chance. 
The poet appears to be the only person who refers everything 
to his moral consciousness, and raves over that absence of design 
and beneficence of purpose which he so unceasingly displays 
himself. There is something sublime in this transfusion of all 
the social, material, and spiritual phenomena of the universe 
into the alembic of one mind, and finding all dross ; in this 
summoning of the elements which furnish forth the whole of 
creation to the bar of his individual judgment, and the repu- 
diation of all as worthless. But this is not the spirit for 
entering into the soul of things, for appreciating historic events, 
for weighing human action, or casting characters in the moulds 
of truth. It would be idle to expect from a state of mind so 
radically unsound, any ideal glimpses into that state of per- 



208 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

fection to which man may not unreasonably aspire. Such a 
class of mind is competent to destroy, but it cannot possibly 
build up. It may represent with great vigour the darker phases 
of the past and the present, or the proud and restless agitations 
of unquiet minds ; but the quieter aspects of humanity are to 
it a sealed book. The development of any action evolving 
good out of evil, or the expansion of the social virtues under cir- 
cumstances calculated to stifle their growth, or the construc- 
tion of an ideal future exhibiting a practical outlet from the 
miseries of the present, — of these things it knows nothing. 
Hence, a wide region of the functions of poetry is excluded 
from its sphere, though it may be supreme in the rest. Such 
was the genius of Lord Byron, — of unrivalled ascendency in the 
embodiment of passion and in the regions of abstract thought 
and contemplative grandeur, but singularly wanting in moral 
purpose, in aesthetic completeness, in that breadth of view 
which loses sight of no elements of human nature, but con- 
siders every object in its proper sphere, and which, instead of 
balancing all things upon the narrow axis of self, loses sight 
of its own existence in the ocean of being by which it is 
surrounded. 

I am not disposed to lay any stress on Lord Byron's private 
circumstances, as affording any palliation for the morbid mis- 
anthropy and reckless egotism in which he indulged. These obli- 
quities were, doubtless, produced by youthful excesses, and the 
early feeling of the emptiness of material enjoyment, the only 
meteor which seemed to guide his steps through the tortuous 
mazes of this world. His domestic troubles, which just came 
in time to confirm this tendency, were also of his own creation. 
The family estates were, doubtless, unequal to support his rank, 
but his genius was fully adequate to make up the deficiency. 
Yet, with a deep assurance of such fact, he chose to marry an 
heiress of temper incompatible with his own, and a strict zealot 
in the cause of evangelical principles which he repudiated, in 
order to recruit his finances, while he was bestowing the copy- 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 209 

rights of his works on his friends. Even for a considerable 
period after his marriage, the poet lived in a style of reckless 
extravagance, without wasting a thought upon his competence 
to meet his bills. If a man will so far tread opposite to the 
paths of prudence, if he will place himself in a position so 
incompatible with duty and common sense, he has no right, 
when the reckoning-day arrives, to blame the Fates for the evils 
he has brought upon himself. Had Lord Byron's fortune been 
ample, he never would have married Miss Millbank. This was 
thtfons et origo malorum. He took to his arms a person whom 
he supposed to be a Christian lamb, and he found her a religious 
termagant. As his inducement was money, the world will ex- 
claim, he was well punished for his pains. This was the most 
unpoetical act of his life. But it led to a change of plans 
and purposes most fruitful in the development of his poetical 
genius, and the aggrandizement of his fame. It drove him 
from the allurements of a factitious life into the bosom of 
nature. It led him to seek out a home among Alpine solitudes, 
by the lonely ocean, or in cities peopled by the spectres of the 
past. The change made itself at once felt in pluming his 
genius for greater flights than it had previously sustained. 

Indeed, so far were the private fortunes of the noble bard from 
imposing trammels on the healthy development of his faculties, 
that it would be difficult,- had those faculties not been warped 
by selfish indulgence and turbulent passions, to imagine a set 
of circumstances better calculated to foster their strength, to 
stimulate their growth, and mature their powers. A boyhood 
passed upon the mountains of Aberdeenshire, listening to the roar 
of the distant ocean, brought out in salient contrast the features 
of the great public school, to which he was subsequently trans- 
ferred. Here, was gilded conventionality following hard upon 
the embraces of genuine nature. But the aesthetic pleasures of 
rural life might have taught him to distrust, if not despise, the 
hollow prestige of rank, or those flashy distinctions which mere 
wealth can alone produce for its possessors. The effect, however, 

14 



210 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

of the display of luxuries which he could not share, was only to 
sour his disposition, to engender spleen, and to turn his mind 
upon itself. Cambridge was only a wider Harrow ; but Byron 
abandoned the intellectual struggles, to drown his cares in the 
convivialities, of the place. Then came three years of foreign 
travel through the grandest scenery and most interesting 
countries in the world ; then three years of London society, — 
in which he mingled with all classes, from the pugilist and the 
cock-fighter, to the proudest scions of the aristocracy, — followed 
by foreign travel again. No career, perhaps, could be imagined 
better fitted to extend the intellectual horizon of a man, or to 
lead to any rectification of his aesthetic or moral principles, if 
he set out with such upon a wrong basis. But Byron does not 
appear to have availed himself of such experiences to obliterate 
his misanthropy, or to counteract, to any large extent, that 
tendency to self-exaggeration, in which he so early indulged. 
These, though somewhat modified, still continued to be the 
plague-spots which overshadowed his career, down to his last 
struggles on the coast of Missolonghi. Neither experience of 
the world, or converse with nature or himself, could ever check 
that biting spirit of ridicule, — that sneer at man and his ways, 
which overflows all his works, and which seem to have been 
one of the engrained principles of his nature. This precluded 
him from that logical appreciation of events, the absence of 
which is so evident in his dramas. It also shut him out from 
that hearty sympathy with social life, which is the main spring 
to the successful embodiment of character. The lesson, there- 
fore, to be gleaned from Byron's career is simply this, that 
there is a close connection between the moral and intellectual 
faculties of man, and that, if the heart be wrong, the highest gifts 
of genius will be warped in their development, if not deprived of 
a large portion of their heritage. Byron as a poet I hold to be 
superior to Spenser, yet it is very questionable whether, in his 
influence over the public mind, he is destined to exercise so 
much influence as Thomson or Cowper, men of far inferior 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL, 



calibre, but who cultivated the talents they possessed upon a 
philanthropic basis. Men do not like being told they are hated ; 
nor are they disposed to submit their necks to establish the 
empire of a man who regards them as serfs, and himself as the 
only creature whose destinies are worthy of any consideration. 
Sovereignty in literature is not like the tyrannies of the lower 
empire, to be established by force and supported by fear. 
Praise cannot be extorted. Men will not be coerced into 
admiration. There can be no passport to permanent and uni- 
versal masterdom over men's minds, unless that which is raised 
upon a genuine sympathy with their interests, and a hearty love 
for their kind. Hence Byron's genius, like Churchill's, is never 
likely to realize its fair meed of praise. Born with talents fitted 
to rule mankind, he allowed the sceptre to be grasped by far 
meaner spirits, who, because they pursued a direct course, have 
been thought to soar higher, though, in truth, they have not 
possessed one tithe of his contemplative depth, or his ideal 
splendour. 



212 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



%tatt. 

TO Scott belongs the great merit of popularizing poetry, or, 
at least, of awakening the national mind to its uses, at a 
time when the practice of the art appeared to be expiring in the 
odes of Pye, and when men failed to appreciate the broader 
lights which were gradually revealing the approach of a glorious 
dawn. Wordsworth was comparatively obscure, Byron had 
not appeared, and Campbell was only becoming known, when 
Scott, diving into the human heart, discovered the secret of 
gratifying its taste for the mysterious, and interesting all its 
sympathies in tales of knightly worth, of feudal renown, and 
perilous adventure, not, indeed, in the hackneyed style of the 
old romances, but as connected with some decisive event which 
served to impart an air of reality to his creations. Men saw 
revived, as in a glass, all the artistic features of the middle 
ages, just as the last vestige of them had sunk beneath the tide 
of modern innovation. It was a startling novelty for the new 
era to have passed before it, — the kings, priests, and warriors 
and serfs of the old era, separated by impassable barriers, yet 
jostling each other in promiscuous groups, with living hearts 
bounding under antiquated armour, with their lavish code of 
warm fellowship so absurdly illustrated by the blackness of 
their feuds, with force instead of law as an arbiter, with 
tournaments instead of commerce as a pursuit, and with moated 
castles instead of undefended streets as dwelling-places. By 
bringing the new in contact with the old, men were enabled to 
trace the same bounding hopes and fears, the same hatreds and 



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ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 213 

loves, the same rivalries and aspirations, arrayed in different attire, 
developed under conflicting institutions, which now actuate them, 
and animating a social structure they had hitherto vainly striven 
to piece together from the dry investigations of the lawyer, or 
the tedious narrative of the historian. The poet himself had 
been led to strike his shaft into this rich mine of art rather by 
accident than otherwise. The Countess of Dalkeith, infatuated 
With the elfin legend of " Gilpin Horner," invited Scott, already 
noted for his ballad minstrelsy, to try his powers upon it. The 
rich fragment of " Christabel," with which Scott had just made 
himself familiar, not only suggested both the treatment and the 
metre, but also made him keenly alive to the feeling of dis- 
appointment arising in the reader's mind from applying so 
splendid a framework to an unfinished subject. The poet, 
therefore, strove to interweave the magic of his theme with the 
border feuds of the seventeenth century. The finishing step 
was to put the whole story into the mouth of an old harper, 
who, as the last of his race, was supposed to have caught some 
of the refinements of modern, without losing the simplicity of 
primitive poetry. Thus sprung into life the " Lay of the Last 
Minstrel," the first narrative poem which may be said to have 
taken the English as well as the Scotch public by storm, and 
which proved as great a favourite in the cottage as in the 
palace. To the " Lay " succeeded " Marmion " and the " Lady 
of the Lake," each swelling the triumph of its predecessor. 
While the epics of Southey lay dead on the shelf, edition 
after edition of these poems was demanded, with increasing 
popularity. But, confined to one field, the ablest genius must 
soon exhaust its combinations, and fatigue his reader, as a 
singer, by the repetition of the sweetest melodies, with a sense 
of monotony. As Scott had turned the treatment and metre 
of " Christabel " to account, so Byron applied Scott's dashing 
narrative to incidents of a more modern and cosmopolitan 
character; and the decline of "Rokeby " told its author that 
the fires of his genius must wane before that of the eccentric 



214 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

luminary whose blaze was just beginning to flood the horizon. 
But Scott had fulfilled a double mission. He had not only 
triumphed himself, but prepared the ground for the triumph 
of his rivals. His appearance, like that of a meteor^ at- 
tracted the eyes of all his contemporaries to the study of 
modern poetry, and stimulated the efforts of genius by bringing 
home to its convictions the fact, that there was an outside 
public prepared to appreciate its merits and respond to its 
exertions. 

The poetic genius of Scott, high as it stands, is confined 
within very narrow limits. He has not the slightest pretension 
to any merit 'in the delineation of passion, a sphere in which 
Byron ruled supreme ; neither has he the melting tenderness of 
Burns, or the fire and animation of Campbell, or the gushing 
sentimentality of Moore, or the grand abstraction and deep 
reflectiveness of Wordsworth. In fact, no poet who ever 
attained eminence, has been so devoid of any of these great 
characteristics as Scott. Even his most sentimental scenes 
have a certain hardness of outline, which reminds us of the man 
who was constantly hammering at the literary anvil, in the 
bosom of his family, and who never suffered himself to be the 
victim of any passion which could imperil his worldly sagacity, 
or his reputation for common sense. With his rivals, poetry 
was not so much a calling as a vocation. It was part of their 
nature, which they drunk in with every breath of their life. 
With Scott it was merely an external mantle, which he put on by 
accident, and which he cast off when it had served his purpose, 
and when he found another sphere wherein to reign without a 
competitor. But, with the millinery of the conventional artist, 
he has accomplished more than poets of more profound sensi- 
bility, by massing together large bodies of men in some ani- 
mating spectacle, and imparting to their leaders those individual 
traits of character which kindle the scene into life and activity. 
His pages glow with the multitudinous groups of Frith's 
canvas ; but, while the painter never gets beyond the material 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 215 

vulgarities of the 19th century, the poet uses the external 
embodiment of the 16th, only to throw out, into bolder relief, 
all the ardour, romance, and enthusiasm which distinguished 
Scotland during this crisis of her fate. Hence, his triumphs 
are confined, not merely to one chapter in the drama of human 
events, but to one page in the history of his country. Even 
his marvellous delineations of scenery rarely cross the 
Tweed. The truth is, Scott wrote about no subject in which 
his heart was not profoundly interested, or with the details of 
which he was not perfectly familiar. This is the real secret of 
his success. He idolized the wild scenery of his native 
country, and has described it in imperishable language. His 
love for the mysterious led him early to haunt ruined castles, 
and re-people them with the phantoms of their past existence. 
Hence the study of antiquarian lore became a necessity of his 
being. He read up old chronicles, devoured legendary tales, 
tracked to its source-every heraldic distinction, studied feudal 
customs, until chivalry became to him the only real thing in 
the world which had any meaning. When, therefore, the spark 
of poetry kindled his soul, it was only to light up, in one 
effulgent blaze, the knowledge thus acquired. He could sing 
only of ancient feuds, of magical enchantments, of mailed 
knights bent upon feats' of war or gallantry, of gentle dames 
and cowled priests crossing each other's paths in the intrigues 
of love and state craft, of errant damsels in moated castles, 
perplexed by the claims of rival chieftains ; but this was done 
with a brilliancy of effect, with a splendour of colouring, with a 
fidelity to nature down to the most minute detail, which has 
never been surpassed; and with a truthful accuracy which 
simulated life in every degree of rank, and which may be said to 
have generalized history. Had Scott allowed his genius free 
bridle over a wider field ; had he chosen subjects for his muse 
from a period in which wandering harpers could find no place, 
he would have lost rank in Parnassus. It was only by con- 
centrating his poetic powers upon the subject he knew most 



216 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

about, that he was enabled to place his name among the first- 
class poets of his epoch. 

Scott was too sedulously employed in reconstructing the 
past, to enlighten the present, or to anticipate the future. 
The reader will not get from him the slightest glimpse into 
man's loftier destinies, or the least glimmering of light upon 
any of the perplexing enigmas which are at present haunting 
humanity. Scott, like Moore, was too objective to infuse 
philosophy into any of his themes ; but, though each looked at 
man from opposite poles of political thought, the reflective poetry 
of both is tinged with the same hues of melancholy. The sad- 
ness of Moore, however, appears to spring from the decay of 
ephemeral hopes, and from the fleeting nature of earthly joys ; 
while the melancholy of Scott is that of the minstrel, who feels 
that society is entering upon new and untried paths, and 
breaking up all the old landmarks which connected life with 
chivalrous feeling and romantic sentiment. The perfection of 
social existence with Scott, was that presented by the feudal 
lord surrounded by his band of dependants, who, in return 
for his protection, returned to him willing service and spon- 
taneous homage. The study of chivalry appears to have led 
him to value men according to their heraldic distinctions. He 
was too aristocratic in his feelings to have much sympathy with 
the spirit of his age, which was gradually levelling the barriers 
between the higher and lower ranks of society. Other poets 
might take waggoners or pirates for their subject, but Scott, in 
verse, would make a hero of no man who had not an emblazoned 
scutcheon, or who could not trace his ancestry back to the Con- 
quest. He moves among courts and camps, with the air of a man 
born to companion nobles and princes. To him, the great mass 
of the people seemed only of importance so far as they augment 
the greatness, and afford scope for the benevolence, of their 
masters. The poet had a capacious heart as well as a large 
head, and sought to indulge the generosity, which distinguished 
his nature, by the same acts which gratified his ambition. 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 217 

Scott, therefore, arrayed the pride of ancestry against the 
power of intellect. Byron reversed the process. Both poets^ 
acted in singular contrariety to the position from which they set 
out in life. Byron with his proud Norman abbey and lordly 
escutcheon, seemed never so happy as when he could forget 
both. The aim of Scott's life was to possess himself of those 
aristocratic appendages, which his rival, on the threshold of his 
career, tossed from him with scornful depreciation. Byron 
snapt asunder the links which bound him to the past, to live in 
the present ; Scott tore himself from the present, to live in the 
past. Byron, though an aristocrat, enlisted the fervour of his 
muse, and even drew his sword, in favour of liberty ; Scott, 
though a commoner, exhausted all his powers in the embellish- 
ment of villanage and feudal dependence. It would be idle 
to expect from one treading so opposite to the tendencies 
of his times, any light for the guidance of humanity; and 
Scott's sympathies were too deeply entangled with the old 
elements of society, to look forward with hope to new com- 
binations. 

It is only, then, as the reviver of the mediaeval aspects of his 
country, that Scott, as a poet, is entitled to claim our regard. 
He is the bard of Scotch chivalry, and nothing more. And 
even in this limited sphere, his triumphs are confined to narra- 
tive poetry. As a lyrist, he was too deficient in passion and 
earnestness of feeling to challenge exclusive attention to his 
merits ; and he has shown great judgment in interweaving his 
songs with his narrative, which imparts to them an interest 
they would not otherwise possess. For Scott always contrived 
for his lyrics a brilliant setting, in order that they might reflect 
light upon his scenic delineations, while these, in turn, imparted 
to them those hues which soften down much of their original 
harshness. A song scattered from a harp's strings, by moon- 
light, over the waters of a silver mere, or the ditty of a maiden 
arresting the steps of her lover in a wild glen, or a refrain in a 
banditti's cave or baronial hall, foreshadowing the glare of the 



2 1 8 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

impending strife on the morrow, — each possess an interest to 
which the isolated lyric can lay no claim whatever. In fact, if 
the best of Scott's songs be taken out of the magnificent frame- 
work of his narrative, they will be found far below those of 
Moore and Campbell on kindred subjects, while a considerable 
number of them are not much above mediocrity. 

It speaks much in favour of Scott's good sense, that he should 
have restricted his efforts to that department of poetry in which 
his faculties best qualified him to shine. Necessity has no law, 
and men can only succeed in that walk for which nature has 
fitted them. The poet could only supply his want of abstract 
grandeur, of mental introspection, of profound pathos, by thrill- 
ing incident, by startling contrasts of situation, by grand scenic 
effects, by powerful delineation of character ; and these could 
not, without the accompaniment of intense feeling, be combined 
with success except in the narrative poem. To say that Scott 
combined these qualities in a more effective manner than had 
been accomplished before, is praise of a high character ; but it 
is praise to which he is justly entitled. By blending truth with 
fiction, he has imparted to his pictures an air of reality which, 
considering their relations to the weird world, surpasses that 
achieved by any other poet who has ventured to throw aside 
the curtains of the material universe. 

In intermingling weird superstitions with his narrative, Scott 
was true to the character of the times he was endeavouring to 
depict ; but in confounding these with the whole machinery of 
the supernatural then existing, the poet committed an error 
which should not be overlooked in any fair estimate of his 
powers. Scott's intellect, like Byron's, was of that broad cha- 
racter to require for its exhibition nothing less than the re- 
production of an age; but Byron had his triumphs in other 
branches of his art, whereas Scott's merits are to be tried by his 
success in this sphere exclusively. When, therefore, the poet 
sacrifices that broad spirit of Christianity permeating all the 
institutions of chivalry to a few wild legends, he dwarfs the 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 219 

leading element of the age, and substitutes an excrescence, 
springing out of the luxuriance of belief, for the vital principle 
generating life-blood at the core. But this mistake the poet 
was hurried into by the objective bent of his genius. Of the 
abyssmal depths of religious feeling and the deeper mysteries of 
the human heart, Scott knew very little, and discoursed less. 
Hence, while the martial tendencies of the age are thrown into 
glaring prominence, all the glimpses we get of that belief 
which piled up our huge cathedrals, which threw Europe with 
unsheathed sabre upon the throat of Asia, which resurrection- 
ized art in Italy, are one or two monkish processions calculated 
to call up a smile on the face of the greenest Ritualist by the 
complete manner in which the prescriptions of the Latin rubric 
are set at defiance. The velvet-bound breviary and Benedic- 
tine habit of Lady Clare are but poor exemplifications of that 
spirit which led a crowd of delicately-trained women to main- 
tain a constant warfare, behind conventual grills, with their own 
nature within, and the pomps of life without, cheerlessly wasting 
upon prison solitudes that beauty intended to illuminate the 
atmosphere of busy life. In not diving beneath the surface, in 
giving us a mere travesty of the external embodiment in which 
this intensity of religious feeling had wrapped itself, Scott so 
far was untrue to the spirit of the age he would represent. That 
the poet, however, has raised the ghost of chivalry from the 
tomb in such a manner as to interest the public in its lineaments, 
is sufficiently evident from the popularity which his works still 
command. But the phantom does not glare upon us in its 
religious aspects, simply because the poet has been too intent 
upon colouring its integuments rather than making them the 
medium for flashing forth its soul. It is very rare to find an 
author who, like Shakespeare, can instruct and amuse in equal 
proportion j and Scott, out of an anxious desire to gratify the 
low standard of the popular taste, stooped from the lofty require- 
ments of his art. His was not the bold genius which could 
reconstruct an age, with all that breadth of design and matchless 



220 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

symmetry of parts as to lead the public mind to forget its present 
baubles in the overpowering sense of joy felt in the delineation. 

In construction of plot, Scott's merits are not of the highest 
order. He was too intent upon the gorgeous contrasts 
and picturesque grouping of the parts to attend to the com- 
pleteness of the whole. But merit, which he could only share 
with the novelist, seemed to him very secondary, compared with 
the enhancement of the higher qualities which are the exclusive 
heritage of the poet. Hence, with the single exception of the 
" Lady of the Lake," the juncture and ligaments of Scott's fables 
will not bear minute analysis. In " Marmion," the main incidents 
of the story are treated in a fragmentary fashion, and the reader 
is left to connect the broken links as he best may, while the 
interest turns upon a multitude of improbable occurrences, which 
require the infantine stage of credulity to realize. In the first, 
as well as in the last of his tales, there are two distinct parts 
having no natural connection with each other. The achieve- 
ments of the wizard Scott with the adventures of his magical 
book, had no more to do with the border feuds of Howard and 
Douglas, than the perplexing loves of Lord Ronald with the 
fates of Robert Bruce ; nor has the poet succeeded in moulding 
the alien elements so closely as to make one spring out of the 
other, or even had the poor merit of assigning to each a sphere 
proportionate to its dignity. But in both the "Lay" and the 
" Lord of the Isles" he has dwarfed the leading event into an 
episode, and exalted what ought to have been an episode into 
the leading event. In "Rokeby" we have unity of action, but 
probability of incident is set more resolutely at defiance, and 
the thread of the story more hopelessly entangled than in 
" Marmion." That the poet should make us forget such defects 
by the magic of his treatment, is one of the triumphs of his art. 
The individual scenes are so artistically finished, the minor 
incidents are so elaborated, that we lose sight of the incon- 
gruities, marring the framework of the design, in the lavish 
shower of beauties flung with reckless profusion at our feet. 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 221 

It is in the embellishment of his plots by graphic incidents, 
as well as in his matchless delineation of character, that Scott's 
powers as a poet are most conspicuous. He knew how to 
crowd his canvas with those lights and shades which have the 
effect of conveying the poet's creations, with all their freshness 
and reality, into the reader's heart. The picture of delicate 
beauty confronting giant strength, of the quiet repose of nature 
disturbed with the shaggy panoply of arms, of the silence and 
darkness of midnight broken by the war-whoop of the trooper 
or the torch of the incendiary, — these and other kindred 
points of contrast, the poet brings out with a minuteness of 
touch which sets up the entire scene with all its gorgeous 
diversity of colouring before our eyes, while the faintest rever- 
beration of its sounds echo on the ear. The explorations of 
Deloraine in Melrose Abbey, the battle-scene in "Marmion," 
the adventure of Fitz James with Roderic Dhu, and the 
moonlight etchings of all his pieces, are hardly to be surpassed 
by anything of the same kind in modern poetry. When, in 
addition to these excellences, we get a story so faultless in con- 
struction as the " Lady of the Lake," the author has achieved 
the highest success that could be attained in a narrative poem 
embodying the external rather than the internal features of his 
subject. 

In the delineation of masculine character, Scott leaves 
few things to be desired ; but he is far more happy in his 
portraiture of men than in that of women. I suppose we must 
ascribe it to the gallantry of his nature, that he thought every 
woman an angel by right of her sex. His heroines from 
Margaret to Matilda, or from Lady Clare to Isabel, are all 
perfect in character, and therefore very imperfect in execution. 
Perhaps, there was some charm in the middle ages which made 
virtue the never-failing appendage of weakness, and vice of 
strength. But Matilda was far removed from the times of 
Margaret or Lady Clare ; yet they only need exchange costumes, 
to exchange places with each other. The Benedictine gown 



222 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POE TS. 

and the breviary would have become Ellen quite as well as the 
Scotch plaid. Constance is the only one of his heroines who 
displays a spark of fire ; yet this is in connection with guilt so 
revolting that imagination shrinks from uniting it with the soft 
beauty of a delicate woman. Scott would appear to have 
produced his feminine creations as types for the study of 
boarding-school girls; and when he went in for goodness or 
frailty, laid on the colour in order to deter or allure as heavily 
as possible. Nor am I without a suspicion, from the popu- 
larity of his works, that the consequent tameness of his hero- 
ines has not produced its results in much of the mawkish 
and monotonous insipidity we meet with in many of the women 
of the present day. How different are the Medoras, the Para- 
sinas, the Zuleikas, the Haidees of Lord Byron — beings 
starting into life with all the distinctness which appertain to 
different climes, yet as true to nature as if they had been 
chiseled out of a block of granite by Praxiteles, mingling their 
spiritual essence with the fiery glow of desire, with all that 
we know of heaven, in their eyes, and all that we feel of 
voluptuous passion, on their lips. The fact is, no man can 
paint women who has not a gushing well-spring of tenderness 
in himself. And the absence of the quality which Scott wanted 
to make him a first-class lyrist, was painfully evinced, when 
Scott sat down to limn the features of any of the more in- 
teresting half of the human race. 

The male characters of Scott have an individuality to which 
his female embodiments cannot pretend, and the wonder is 
that he, who drew women so badly, should have sketched men 
so well. In all his pieces his heroes stand out with a distinct- 
ness of outline in their bolder features, and with a peculiarity 
of tinge in the lighter and more evanescent traits of character, 
which make them not only life-like themselves, but out of the 
light of their own reality, to shed the quickening beams of 
animation upon all with whom they are brought in contact. 
The heavy but daring Deloraine, — the courtly but fearless 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 223 

Cranistoun, — the soldier-monk, whose wan features occasionally 
gleam with the fires of his crusading days ; — the fiery Dacre, and 
the pacific Howard, each appear in the " Lay" to act as the 
counterfoil to the other, while they remain quite distinct from 
the personages to whom Scott introduces us, anywhere else. 
The character of Roderick Dhu with its conflicting traits of 
savage cruelty in peace, and its delicate susceptibilities of 
honour during war, is a study in itself. Sensuousness is 
blended in James, with the silken graces and airy blandish- 
ments of a king who lives in the gaieties of others ; in "Marmion," 
with the hardened scepticism and testy disposition of a knight, 
who lives only in the aggrandisement of himself. These 
diversities of character, springing out of the same passion, 
operating upon different temperaments, are not the result of 
laboured effort. For Scott, though elaborately minute in the 
specification of the dress and equipage of his heroes, though 
he will suspend his narrative until he has settled the martlets on 
their shields, and told us whether the field of their scutcheons 
is argent, or d'or, when he comes to their character, seizes at 
once upon the master passion, and, by two or three leading 
strokes, stamps the man's history on his face, in hues which 
impart a meaning to the least of his actions. Scott's pains- 
taking description of articles of attire, which occasionally has the 
air of an inventory, though frequently censured, was to some 
extent necessary, to impart an appearance of reality to those few 
touches on which he relied for breathing animation into figures 
decorated with so much skill. But here, again, the aristocratic 
feelings of the poet prevailed over the claims of his art. Scott, 
rarely wastes his descriptive powers upon any characters, 
but those who compose the cream of society. A man below 
the grade of squire is not fit for elaborate notice. He selects, 
in his poems, for the subject of full length portraiture, none but 
warriors, knights, princes, abbots, and lords. But it cannot 
be overlooked that this limited range of selection, which would 
have been fatal to any artistic representation of modern society, 



224 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

is not out of character with the representation of a feudal 
community, in which the fate of the people was merged in the 
fortunes of their chiefs. Scott's vassals and retainers, if sum- 
marily disposed of in his pictures, occupy a position analogous 
to that which they hold in the state of society he describes ; 
and the characters of their chiefs are so well delineated, that 
the age to which both belonged, at least in its martial aspects, 
though long since calcined to dust, is made to revive again with 
all the animation of yesterday. 

It is owing to his success in breathing into the martial relics 
of chivalry the spirit of human life, that Scott is entitled to a 
high place in narrative poetry. If he wants the passion and fire 
of Moore and Campbell, his pictures are more true to nature 
than either. His tales have much more incident, and his 
heroes stride before us with an earnestness endued with the 
vitality of history, rather than with the sentimentality which 
speaks of the atmosphere of romance. Other narrative poets 
have simply confined their attention to the illustration of some 
particular virtue, or the development of one definite action. 
Chaucer, Spenser, Byron, and Scott, have alone endeavoured 
to reproduce an age, by weaving the tissues of many single 
destinies into one magnificent delineation of human life. They 
only have unrolled the myriad-minded tapestry of the Fates 
before us, in depicting the conjoint lives of a generation. 
Though Scott's canvas embraces a far greater number of 
groups than that of any of his three rivals, he is decidedly the 
last in rank. He is far less ideal than Spenser, less compre- 
hensive than Byron, less truthful than Chaucer, less original 
than Crabbe. Even Burns excels him in reproducing, fresh, 
as it were, from the mint, the lineaments of nature, though 
" Tam o'Shanter " is so brief a sketch, that it is hardly fair to 
Scott to institute a comparison. His words seldom pierce the 
heart ; the passions never obey his call. If Scott seems, how- 
ever, to shine with steadier light in narrative poetry than most 
of his contemporaries, it is because he excels them in creative 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL, 225 

force, in the breadth of his designs, in the vivid grouping of 
external objects, in portraying critical phases of character under 
striking situations, rather than in deep feeling, profound thought, 
or in those bold flights of imagination which fire the soul with 
a feeling of sublimity. To Byron and Wordsworth, his general 
inferiority is beyond question; in respect of genuine poetic 
fire, he is beneath Burns, Moore, and Campbell, while he is 
superior to any of his rivals in the creation of incidents, in 
the manipulation of events, and the grouping of his characters, 
with a view to secure that dramatic interest so necessary to the 
success of a narrative poem. If he had not so great a genius 
as some of his contemporaries, he was possessed, to a greater 
degree than any, of that hard-working talent which is able in 
the eyes of the million to magnify genius into thrice its actual 
dimensions. And nowhere is that talent capable of being 
turned to more account than in the department on which 
Scott lavished alL his strength. But artistic talent, even here, 
would not have sufficed to account for Scott's eminence, with- 
out some creative power, and both combined have equally 
contributed to place him in the rear of the first group of 
narrative poets, at some distance from those of the foremost 
rank, who may, nevertheless, feel proud of his companionship, 
as the reviver of one of the most interesting fragments in the 
history of nations. 



*5 



226 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



19 X z. 

IT will be generally found that a poet's social habits, his 
peculiar disposition, and general conduct furnish a clue to 
his works. As both derive their colouring from the same source, 
each reflects light on the other. A man's actions impart their 
tints to his speculative thoughts in a thousand ways, which are 
often invisible to himself. They afford a key to the solution 
of their character. If this is so of other poets, it is especially 
true of Moore. There was a want of hearty genuineness in the 
man ; a substitution of conventional feeling for the unaffected 
simplicity of nature ; a studied urbanity of manner which, out 
of a vain desire to court the great, led him to damp the fervour 
of the fires within, — a disposition to play two parts, often 
mutually repelling, which weakened the spontaneous ebulli- 
tions of his nature. He was a Catholic, and yet educated his 
children in the Protestant communion. He was a patriot, self- 
exiled from his country, which he seldom cared to revisit. He 
was a father, most loving in his professions of attachment for 
the domestic hearth, and yet spending all his evenings in the 
glittering circles of fashionable society. He was a sturdy child 
of independence, while he, accepted a pension, and hankered 
after place ; * and a generous sympathiser with the best interests 

* " Neither am I sorry for having come to Bermuda. The appointment 
is respectable, and was considered a matter of great patronage among those 
who had the disposal of it, which alone is sufficient to make it a valuable 
step towards perferment." — Letter to Mrs. " Moore's Journal of Cor- 
respondence, " vol. i. p. 151. 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 227 

of his species, while passing his life in the cold shade of the 
Whig aristocracy. But the poet has enshrined his excuses 
in the song " Oh, blame not the bard," supposed to be sung by 
a minstrel of the ninth century, in so plaintive a manner as to 
make even a Fenian overlook his delinquencies. 

Hence, wherever the poet went, he evinced few congenial 
sympathies with man out of the pale of polished society. In 
Bermuda, according to Shakespeare, the birthplace of Ariel, — 
whither, I suppose, his patrons sent him, because his muse 
had some resemblance to that flighty and indefatigable 
sylph, — he was fascinated with the climate, but had little taste 
for the inhabitants. He found the ladies more lavish of their 
affections than their charms were calculated to make enjoyable; 
while he treats their husbands as patient cuckolds, who relin- 
quished, with good grace, their exclusive right to privileges which 
were not worth possessing. Hence, the ancient philosopher, who 
held that, after this life, men are changed into mules, and women 
into turtles, might have seen this metamorphosis accomplished 
in Bermuda. But it is in the United States that the peculiar 
traits of Moore's character are most prominently brought out. 
Burke had seen imaged, in the rising Republic, the future 
glories of the human race. The poet himself tells us he de- 
parted for America with the bounding hope of embracing in 
that State the divinity of a Utopian commonwealth. But he 
was shocked to find, instead, a loose strumpet distributing her 
favours, according to the dictates of political corruption, among 
a mob of coarse barbarians. Even our transatlantic sisters, than 
whom there are no fairer specimens of feminine beauty, are 
represented as haggard as the state they inhabit : — 

Like the nymphs of her own withering clime, 
She is olden in youth, she is blasted in prime. 

America, in the view of the Irish statesman, could have no 
fairer handmaidens for her spousals with Liberty than Trade 
and Commerce. But, in the eyes of the Irish poet, industrial 



228 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

pursuits had vulgarised the union, and rendered the offspring 
plebeian. In this flattering manner did Moore speak of the 
respectable population of America : — 

The motley dregs of every distant clime, 
Each blast of anarchy, and taint of crime 
Which Europe shakes from her perturbed sphere. 

The Americans, according to him, had acquired freedom, not 
on account of any love of independence, but simply to make 
George III. a bankrupt. The President of the day, who 
happened to have a favourite negress, gives Moore an oppor- 
tunity of indulging his peculiar vein : — 

The weary statesman, for repose, has fled 
From halls of council to his negro's shed, 
Where blest he woos some black Aspasia's grace, 
And dreams of Freedom in his slave's embrace. 

The aspirations of the enlightened population of the western 
continent were merged into the assumed crime of one man, in 
order that they might be treated as a brute race, without the 
slightest notions of decency or refinement. 

In fact, Moore dwelt too much on the surfaces of things ; he 

was too fond of gaudy glitter and ornament to be a deep thinker, 

capable of diving into the heart of social phenomena, or of 

interesting himself in any phase of humanity not surrounded 

with the vulgar pomps of civilization. Want of refinement, 

with Moore, was a cardinal sin, which cut him off from congenial 

sympathy with threee-fourths of the human species. With the 

nymphs of May Fair, with the belles of the drawing-room, with 

those circles of society which can invest nature with all the 

resources of art, Moore's heart beat in genuine unison. He 

could also appreciate, as well as any man, beautiful scenery 

interspersed with rock and wood gleaming with cascades, — here 

expanding into lakes, there contracting into rivers, — and even 

with towering mountains, provided they stood out in dark 



?pc^- 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 229 

masses against a roseate sky. But if his fellow-creatures did 
not deal largely in cosmetics, or if the landscape simply 
consisted of 

Mountains bare, 
Bare trees, and the green fields, 

both one and the other were more likely to provoke his censure 
than elicit his admiration. Nature, as well as society, required 
a brilliant setting to engage Moore's attention. He appears to 
have taken an interest in both only in proportion to the amount 
of gilding with which they were embellished.; and it is to be 
feared he preferred all the foibles and lying vanities of con- 
ventional life, entrenched beneath a large array of upholstery, 
to the humbler virtues, without. It is this lack, of clear insight 
into humanity, that causes the poet to make up for deep touches 
of nature, by false glitter and overstrained refinement ; it is this 
incapacity of identifying himself with man's loftiest destinies, 
which leads him to touch with lame wing the heights of philo- 
sophy, and to be thoroughly at home in no other region than the 
wanton bower of love. But this passion has such wide-encircling 
ramifications, stretches over such an infinity of joys and sorrows, 
so completely colours with its hues all the objects and vitalizes 
all the energies of human life, that to be master of its emotions 
is to be sovereign of a universe. 

It cannot be denied that Moore, in awakening and gratifying 
the sensuous and more emotional sympathies of our nature, has 
few rivals, though in this department he is more graceful than 
energetic, more tender than pathetic, too inclined to sport with 
imagery caught from the fleeting aspects of nature than to dwell 
in the reflective regions of the human breast. Hence, the im- 
pressions he excites are rather evanescent than durable. The 
structures he builds up are not made of solid and permanent 
materials, but of filagree-work and decorative ornament, which 
rather startle the reader by brilliancy of effect than overpower 
him with emotional grandeur and profound sentiment. There 



230 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

is plaintive melancholy, deep tenderness, exquisite sensibility, 
voluptuous passion, veiled with a spirituality which takes off all 
its coarseness, and a fancy ever on the wing to ransack nature 
for illustrations, till the most distant objects are rendered tribu- 
tary to the brilliant setting of the sentiments he wishes to convey. 
I know, indeed, no poet so prolific of comparisons calculated 
to sculpture his ideas on the mind, or so fitted to etherealize 
the most sensuous images, by the lightness of touch with which 
they are treated, or the spiritual aspects under which they are 
introduced. These embellishments being drawn from the most 
poetic objects in the universe, reflect, in their ever-shifting 
phases, variegated light upon the sentiments they are intended 
to illustrate, until in the pictures of the poet, the shadows of the 
real world are invested with the magical tints of ideal creation. 
The sparkling freshness of the thought, combined with the per- 
fect adaptability of the image, like two burnished mirrors, mul- 
tiply and interfuse each other's hues with such brilliancy, that 
the spiritual snatches from the material its distinctness of out- 
line, while the material imbibes from the spiritual that light 
which dazes the reader with splendour. But as every perfection 
lavished in excess produces corresponding disadvantages, so this 
exuberance of fancy cloys from its very monotony of sweetness. 
It, to a great extent, emasculates the poet's thoughts by breaking 
their continuity. The shaft of reflection cannot strike deep into 
the strata of his subject, while the writer is seeking for flowers to 
adorn the surface. Poverty of conception is frequently hidden 
under a lavish display of ornament, too often introduced to con- 
ceal the absence of more substantial appendages ; as in those 
nymphs who endeavour to supply themselves with symmetrical 
figures by millinery devices, or in those pasteboard creations 
of .Hercules which we meet with on gala-days, when, through 
a judicious arrangement of drapery and flowers, weakness is 
arrayed in all the sumptuous prodigality of strength. 

In narrative poetry, Moore has succeeded even better than 
could have been expected from one whose talents lay in the 






ROMANTIC SCHOOL. , 231 

objective and sentimental sphere. " Lallah Rookh" presents 
the perfection of panoramic scenery, dashed off with the ease 
of a consummate artist. The imagery is as gorgeous and 
imposing as the versification is melodious, or as the similes are 
dazzling and profuse. Feats of daring as heroic as ever 
tempted a patriot's sword, are combined with scenes of tender- 
ness as soft as ever melted a lover's breast ; and the whole is 
pervaded with that languid voluptuousness, which, in the East, 
is so beautiful as to be allied with spirituality. If, in these 
regions, he fails to exhibit the sustained sweetness and natural 
imagery of Burns and Spenser, or the creative genius of Scott 
or Chaucer, his love scenes have more lusciousness, his land- 
scapes are lit up with a splendour quite as ideal, while he hurries 
us along with more dashing vigour and impetuosity. But, 
even here, the reader cannot but feel the want of human interest, 
owing to the absence of lifelike portraiture of character, and 
the attempt to supply the places of natural incident by startling 
denouements and gorgeous contrasts. It is the misfortune 
of Moore, that even in the best of his triumphs, by his lavish 
style of ornament and his deficiency in the subjective element, 
he reminds us too frequently of the metamorphoses of the 
stage, and makes us feel he is producing his effects by theatrical 
display and scenic illusions. Notwithstanding these impres- 
sions, the "Fire Worshippers," and the "Paradise and the Peri," 
which are by far the best of the Arabian tales, would be sufficient 
to entitle Moore to a high place as a narrative poet. In the one, 
there is great fire and energy ; in the other, exquisite elaboration 
of detail and enamel perfection of finish. For construction of 
plot, for the graceful windings and sudden surprises of the story, 
for the succession of striking tableaux, each increasing in splen- 
dour, and for the dramatic interest sustained by keeping the 
figure of Hafed draped to the close, the " Fire Worshippers" may 
rival any other poem, of similar extent, in the language. The 
boarding of Zelica's vessel during a tempest, in which the storm 
of the elements is outrivalled by the fury of man, is matchless 



232 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

both in vigour and execution. The description of the Gheber's 
retreat, for grandeur and sublimity, is also quite equal to any 
similar picture in the language : — 

Around its base, the bare rocks stood, 
Like naked giants, in the flood, 

As if to guard the gulf across ; 
"While on its peak, that brav'd the sky, 
A ruined temple tower'd so high, 

That oft the sleeping albatross 
Struck the wild ruin with her wing, 
And from her cloud-rock'd slumbering 
Started — to find man's dwelling there, 
In her own silent fields of air ! 
Beneath, terrific caverns gave 
Dark welcome to each stormy wave 
That dash'd like midnight revellers in ; — 
And such the strange, mysterious din, 
At times throughout those caverns roll'd, — 
And such the fearful wonders told 
Of restless sprites imprison'd there, 
That bold were Moslem, who would dare, 
At twilight hour, to steer his skiff 
Beneath the Gheber's lonely cliff. * 

Had Moore only written this poem, he would have been en- 
titled, on account of the touches of imaginative passion it con- 
tains, and the ease with which he attains the sublime, to rank in 
the same class with the first of his contemporaries, though, from 
the prevalence of the ornamental over the substantial features of 
narrative poetry, at a respectable distance from the first group. 
Of the "Veiled Prophet" and the "Light of the Harem," I 
cannot say anything like so much. Mokanna's cruelty was too 
revolting, and Nourmahal's pettishness too trifling, to supply 
the foundations of a story fit to be arrayed in all the glittering 
effulgence of the poet's fancy. But, with all the drawbacks of 

* "Fire Worshippers," p. 10. 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 233 

the theme, I do not think Moore has done justice to either. A 
poet whose, invention was more prolific would have made the 
poverty of his materials only act as a foil for the display of the 
splendours which such poor materials were destined to assume, 
when lit up by the flame of his genius. But, if we take away 
the female portraits, and the exquisite lyrics with which he has 
enriched these productions, the rest of the piece collapses like 
those gorgeous sky-cities pellucid with flame, pillared and 
buttressed upon western clouds, at even, when the light which 
illumined them has been withdrawn. Moore, skilful jewel- 
setter as he was, in his smaller pieces, was not competent, 
Eke Wordsworth, to supply deficiency of incident in narrative, 
by individual traits of character, or by startling reflections • 
and when his footlights do not fall on the scenic effects of 
melodramatic action, the power of the master is not fully 
displayed. 

It is this lack of variety of incident, of some common 
ground-plot to serve as a substratum for weaving the stories into 
each other, which deprives the "Loves of the Angels " of that 
brilliancy of treatment which, doubtless, the subject would, 
otherwise, have received. The separate stories themselves 
would, as narrative poems, be entitled to high consideration, 
as the productions of a poet of second class merit in this 
branch of the art, but coming from Moore, the merits of the 
narration are lost sight of in the splendour of his Oriental 
imagery, and in the still more glittering showers of diamond lustre 
which his lyrics flash upon the world. These stories unite deep 
pathos with exquisite tenderness to an extent, perhaps, never 
reached before in our language. But Moore erred in choosing 
oblique narration for the cast of the two first pieces ; and, as he 
completely fails in the denouement of each, he leaves the third 
story without any denouement at all. The monotony of the 
passion, unrelieved by incidents of a sterner sort, is also unvaried 
by difference of character in the angels and their lovers, who 
all appear very much as chips of the same block. Moore, if we 



234 ESiIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

may judge from his female portraits, seems to have adopted the 
absurd opinion of Pope, 

Most women have no characters at all, 

and to have painted them much after the receipt of Diderot, 
that is, with a pen dipped in the colours of the rainbow, with 
the hues softened by the down off butterfly's wings, taking, as 
the general substratum of the character, Pope's couplet, 

A very heathen in the carnal part, 

And yet a right good Christian at the heart. 

For Moore's Leas, Namas, Lilises, as well as his Hindas, 
Zelicas, and Nourmahals, while uniting every external perfection, 

comprise 

A union, which the hand 

Of Nature kept for them alone, 
Of everything most playful, grand, 
Voluptuous, spiritual, bland 
In angel-natures and their own. * 

Each indiscriminately may be addressed in the language Rubi 
applies to his mistress, — 

One in whose love I felt were given 

The mixed delights of either sphere, 
All that the spirit seeks in heaven, 

And all the senses burn for here, f 

In the same manner he paints Hinda, — 

Fill'd with all youth's sweet desires, 
Mingling the meek and vestal fires 
Of other worlds, with all the bliss, 
The fond, weak tenderness of this. 
A soul, too, more than half divine, 

Where, through some shades of earthly feeling, 
Religion's soften'd glories shine, 

Like light through summer foliage stealing. % 

* " Loves of the Angels," second Angel's story. 

t Ibid. 

t The " Fire Worshippers." 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 235 

It is this want of individual traits in his portraits, and his making 
his characters a mere bundle of abstract qualities, which is 
the cardinal defect of Moore's narrative poetry, and which ap- 
pears to the greatest disadvantage in the " Loves of the Angels," 
as this poem has no other element calculated to throw out each 
story in vivid distinctness. Yet, with all the imperfections that 
niggard invention, lack of incident, and sameness of character 
throw over this performance; the variegated gems of fancy which 
light up each page ; the subdued melancholy thrown, like a silken 
veil, over the most voluptuous of the scenes ; and, above all, the 
lyrical charms with which many of those scenes are invested, 
flooding each with melody which haunts the soul like echoes from 
a loftier sphere, — all combine to stamp upon these productions 
the ineffaceable marks of genius. As a whole, they need not fear 
comparison with Byron's drama upon the same theme, though 
Byron, as he always does, went in for realistic treatment. In 
"Heaven and Earth," Byron is inferior to himself. In the 
" Loves of the Angels," Moore is only inferior to his subject. 
In the one, all the harsher features of the picture are brought 
out, till we are repelled by their sternness ; in the other, all its 
tenderness, till we are cloyed by their sweetness. Byron 
triumphs in his conception ; Moore, in his execution. The de- 
scriptions of the latter are too spiritualized ; of the former, too 
earthy. The angels of Moore are weak libertines, who sacrifice 
everything to pleasure ; those of Byron, haughty spirits, who, 
rather than abandon their mistresses, embrace perdition out of 
a sentiment of honour. In Moore, love is not merely the 
chief, but the solitary subject of his canvas. In Byron, it is 
only an episode faintly imaged in the background, while the 
fore-part of the picture is taken up with man in all his irregular 
passions, defying the Deity about to inflict upon him the 
summary chastisement of the deluge. Had not Byron been 
fettered by his Greek notions of the drama, he -would, doubt- 
less, have kindled the blackness of his picture into lights and 
shades, before the splendour of whose contrasts even Moore's 



236 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

glittering radiance would have paled. But as it is, his perform- 
ance only commands attention as a work of art ; while the pro- 
duction of his less gifted contemporary, interlacing itself with 
the affections, enchains our sympathies as a work of passionate 
interest. 

But it is as a lyrical poet that Moore has achieved his highest 
triumphs, and he had the good sense to devote the greater part 
of his energies to a sphere in which nature had most fitted him 
to shine. To some extent, he was fortunate in belonging to a 
country, more than any other in Europe, steeped in misfortune, 
and abounding in popular airs, wherein, as it were, lie en- 
shrined the records of its joys and sorrows, the triumphs of its 
wit, the lament over its broken aspirations, the trumpet tones 
of its victories, and the wail of its defeats. Most of these airs 
were either adapted to songs previously written, or, as was the 
case with the early minstrels, both the tune and the words 
were struck out under the spontaneous impulses of momentary 
inspiration. But such is the superiority of music over language, 
that, in a great many cases, posterity found itself in the position 
of the shepherd in Virgil, who could recall the tune while the 
words were forgotten : 

Numeros memini si verba tenerem. 

It was to wed these melodies to appropriate words, which were 
joined to trivial sentiments, or floating about without any, like 
the ghosts of past songs, that Moore addressed himself; and 
even envy cannot deny that he executed the task with a 
grace and a mellifluous ring of versification which makes the 
tune rather seem a reflex of the words, and not the words an 
embodiment of the melody. The wide range of sentiment 
embraced by the poet, enables him to embody, in the compo- 
sition of a few brief years, the airs which it had taken centuries 
to accumulate, with a diversity of feeling quite equal to the 
shifting fortunes of his country, and the ever-varying temper- 
ament in which the national music had its birth. The tone of 



ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 237 

despondency succeeding to that of defiance, the voice of melan- 
choly mingling with that of gladness, as the freshness of hope 
brightens into fulfilment or fades into vacuity, the levities 
of truth and the more permanent realities of sadness, chasing 
each other with the ever-varying fluctuations of sunlight and 
shadow ; the violence of passion melting in the embraces of 
pity ; tumult dying away into the soft languor of repose, and 
all the alternations of joy or sorrow pouring their confluent 
tides on the confines of youth and age, and rolling their diversified 
currents through the lover's heart, or the patriot's breast, — each 
of these are reflected in the poet's page with an impress which 
wants nothing of reality, except the removal of that soft tinge 
of spirituality which surrounds all his productions with a haze 
of splendour. 

Whether we regard the variety, or extent, or the tenderness, 
or sweetness, or the united excellence of his lyrics, it would be 
difficult to name a poet whom Moore does not excel. But 
conscious where his strength lay, the poet revels in his flights of 
fancy too far ; he indulges in his vein of voluptuousness too 
much, to impart that chastened simplicity and vigour to his 
conceptions, which they most needed to set them in their best 
light. The reckless prodigality with which he scatters his polished 
gems over his thoughts, prevents him from investing them with 
that depth and individual speciality of colouring, which they 
frequently want to wing them to the heart. Hence, Burns 
excels him in intensity of passion, in deep pathos, as well as in 
those descriptions of character or scenery which bring the 
mind in contact with the person depicted, or surround it with 
the objects they would represent. Moore bewails the broken 
fortunes of his country much like an effeminate Greek of Athens 
who wants to luxuriate in the palaces of his oppressor ; while 
Burns sings of independence and liberty with the native fervour 
of a Caledonian, who cares nothing for life beyond his own 
naked mountains. Moore is seldom an Irishman, Burns 
always a Scotchman. Both poets — the one in the roadside 



238 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

cabaret, the other in the patrician's drawing-room, are supreme 
in their respective spheres. But, superior as Burns undoubtedly 
is on his own ground, he sinks somewhat from his height, when 
his lyrics are merged into the larger circle embraced by the 
productions of his more artistic successor, who could pass from 
a devotional hymn, or from an eulogium on Fox, to an imitation 
of Catullus or to a chorus fit for a bacchanalian revel, and pause 
on his way to interpose a coarse satire upon legitimacy or 
priestcraft ; who could, while reclining on the luxurious sofa of 
a Court beauty, indite a languishing sonnet which might charm 
the fastidious taste of Madame de Pompadour, and then sud- 
denly start up with a soul-awakening tribute to liberty, destined 
to keep for ever alive the fires of independence in the breasts 
of his countrymen. 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 239 



CHAPTER X. 

ALEXANDRINE POETS. 

SHELLEY is the only poet who appeared to form a theory 
of the universe perfectly consistent with itself, and to have 
acted up to the convictions so formed, in defiance alike of the 
warning of his friends, and the menaces of society. There 
was no sophistry in his character. He maintained his boyish 
ingenuousness, untainted by a single shadow of hypocrisy, all 
through his life. He wore his heart upon his sleeve for every 
fool to peck at. His thoughts were reflected in his acts ; and 
might be scanned through his features as clearly as the tints of 
the over-arching sky may be traced in the depths of the crystal 
lakes beneath. As he felt, so he sang. There was, consequently, 
greater unity between his intellectual convictions and his 
poetry than ever existed in any other individual ; both appearing 
as the product of the same striving after truth, and blending 
even the feelings of the heart with the cold light of a spiritual 
philosophy. As his opinions were in conflict with those 
upon which the principal institutions of society were built, he 
roused a host of enemies, who left him little rest either day or 
night, but who were continually galling him with the shafts of 
poisoned malice. Hence, his life was a scene of perpetual 
anxiety and struggle. By constitution frail and delicate, he was 
about the last person fitted to endure the buffets which this 
throwing down the gauntlet against society brought on himself. 
But nothing could make Shelley swerve from his course. With 



240 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

a sublime impersonation of Promethean will, he was prepared 
to encounter every form of persecution, in carrying what he 
believed to be the torch of truth down into the darkest recesses 
of the human mind, and annihilating, at their source, the mists 
of prejudice and superstition at once and for ever. 

Astronomers say that if the axis of the earth could be brought 
upon a line with the equator, instead of being twenty-three-and-a- 
half degrees removed from it, we should have perpetual spring. 
Storms would cease, diseases be unknown, and man return to the 
golden age. Shelley thought that society had equally deflected 
from the right path, to the great misery of man, and that it 
might be brought back to the unerring line of justice, reason, 
and love. All his life was an effort in this direction. He 
sought, by applying the lever of spiritual conviction to the heart 
of man, to remove the world to its right place again. The evil 
which Christianity traced to the sin engrafted upon every off- 
shoot of humanity by the conditions of its birth, was to Shelley 
an accident which might be expelled from creation, if man 
would only remain true to the harmonies of his nature. To 
elicit these harmonies; to show their accordance with the 
universe of which man was designed as the crowning feature, 
and mot a mere blotch upon its surface; to demonstrate that 
evil was factitious and transient, and good alone natural and 
permanent, was the aim of Shelley's life, and the object of all 
his writings. If he erred, it was on the side of philanthropy. 
If he stumbled, it was through excess of love. The light 
which led him astray was pre-eminently light from heaven. 

To understand Shelley's principles, and enter into the spirit 
of his poetry, the mind must be to some extent imbued with 
the Alexandrine philosophy. He did not believe in the exist- 
ence of matter. The external universe to him was a phantasm. 
All the outward manifestations of sense were spiritual embodi- 
ments, either alone existing in the mind's ideal sense of such, 
or as the outward moulds of beings as incorporeal as itself. 
Space and time were the mere conditions of sensuous intuition. 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 241 

and fell to pieces with the material phenomena to which they 
fixed the limits of a beginning and an end. We have only to 
rise above the empirical notions of sense to annihilate such 
vulgar conceptions as limits, and wander about like disembodied 
spirits with the whole of immensity for our dwelling-place. If 
all external forms are an illusion, so is death, which is the com- 
mencement of a new life, the entrance on another cycle of 
being, or the mere absorption of the outward embodiments in 
the folds of another more adapted to the spirit's growth. But 
presiding over all these plastic shapes of weird creation, ever 
collapsing and re-clothing themselves with new forms, there was 
a spirit of beauty directing everything to some fit end, and 
sustaining, between the relations of each, that law of harmonious 
development which ought to have its reflex in the moral world. 
The whole hierarchy of spiritual ministrants, whether endued 
with self-consciousness or not, employed in the perpetual re- 
generation of love and beauty in the world, and each working 
in proper sequence, under agents gradually culminating in the 
essence or fountain of good, Shelley blended, with all he rea- 
lized of beauty and truth, in the springs of creation, and in the 
restorative elements of the universe. In like manner, evil had 
its wide-spread agencies, ever active for mischief, operating in 
powerful combination, which it was the duty of man, in unison 
with the law of love, to banish from creation. Shelley be- 
lieved himself, what every man ought to be, an apostle for that 
purpose, and certainly executed his mission in an unflinching 
spirit. Nearly every line of his poetry, as well as every act of 
his life, seemed aimed at extinguishing evil among mankind. 

The theory of the perfectibility of the human race led 
Shelley to make war upon all the elements of society opposed 
to its realization ; and the animosity which the struggle pro- 
voked, threw him with ten-fold force back upon the resources 
of nature. Had Shelley been the lion of social circles, he still 
would have worshipped nature with impassioned enthusiasm ; 
but when nearly every door was slammed in his face, when 

16 



242 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

society regarded him as an explosive individual, — a kind of 
Titanic Sampson, bent upon pulling its framework to pieces, 
in order that he might bury man beneath its ruins, the marvels 
of the universe bound his soul with tenfold Circeian spells. 
His life seems to have been passed in Wooing Nature under all 
her forms. In calm moon-light, in storm and tempest, at the 
uprising of the dawn, or during the fleeting draperies of twi- 
light, Shelley, with the eagerness of a painter, watched every 
changing streak of colour, every purple gleam of light, every 
flickering attenuation of shadow, as if he were inhaling not breath 
from the atmosphere, but inspiration. Shelley, indeed, studied 
natural phenomena so intensely, as if he thought that some 
deeper glimpse into the mysteries of nature, some further solution 
of the problem of existence, and of the enigma of life and death, 
was to be obtained by this zealous scrutiny of her features. 
He appeared to regard the elemental powers with the eye of an 
ancient Greek, and drank in their sounds, as if they brought 
to his soul reliable information from another sphere. At all 
events, his philosophy assured him there was a kinship between 
the soul of man and the active forces of nature ; and if we 
regard his frail tenement and the mighty soul which seemed to 
rend its shell as lightning tears a cloud, it would seem, to have 
required little imagination on his part, to have regarded him- 
self but a short remove from an elemental god. All these 
characteristics, together with his sense of world abandonment, 
the poet has described in language unrivalled for force, beauty, 
and tenderness, in any literature : — 

'Midst others of less note, came one frail form, 

A phantom among men ; companionless 
As the last cloud of an expiring storm, 

Whose thunder is its knell ; he, as I guess, 
Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness 

Actseon-like, and now he fled astray 
With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, 

And his own thoughts along that rugged way 
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey. 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 243 

A pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift, — 

A love in desolation masked ; — a power 
Girt round with weakness ; it can scarce uplift 

The weight of the superincumbent hour. 
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower, 

A breaking billow ; even while we speak, 
Is it not broken ? on the withering flower 

The killing sun smiles brightly : on a cheek 
The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break. 

His head was bound with pansies over-blown, 

And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue, 
And a light spear topped with a Cyprus cone, 

Round whose rude shaft dark ivy tresses grew, 
Yet dripping with the forest's noon-day dew, 

Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart 
Shook the weak hand that grasped it : Of that crew 

He came the last, neglected and apart, 
A herd-abandoned deer, struck by the hunter's dart. * 

The passion of other poets for Nature has been more or less 
of a dilettante character. It has always given way under the 
strain of much physical inconvenience. Wordsworth never 
lingered among beautiful scenery, unless the solid comforts of an 
inn could be found in the immediate neighbourhood. Moore 
had an eye for the artistic combination of glen, mountain, and 
lake, but he must contemplate them from a gilded ottoman with 
a Brussels underneath his feet. With Shelley such things were 
simply ignored. His whole being was swallowed up in the 
thought of the divine loveliness before him. His ascetic diet, 
his absolute scorn of the pleasures of the table, gave him in this 
respect advantage over his contemporaries. He encountered 
all weathers, endured every kind of social inconvenience, in 
order to track the foot-prints of loveliness and grandeur where- 
ever they could be found. Alpine storms, and sea tempests ; 
the roar of the ocean upon romantic coasts, where rugged rocks 
in their wildness emulated the jagged clouds reflecting from 
their burnished faces the splendours of a Claudean sunset ; — 
these were his home, and he appeared to enjoy them the more, 
* Adanais. 



244 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

as they were shut out from the luxuries of conventional society. 
When Shelley saw a grand spot, where Nature revelled in 
majestic and Titanic wonders, it was a matter of very little 
moment to him that there was no decent habitation in the 
place. If there was a hut, he could live in that, and if there 
was not, he could make one. It was in this spirit he pedes- 
trianised Switzerland, and settled upon some of the wildest parts 
of the Italian coast, after having familiarized his mind with the 
beauties of Killarney, the luxuriant valleys of Wales, the wood- 
encircling lakes of Cumberland, and the beech-covered lawns 
of Marlow and Windsor. Even when comfortably housed in 
any of these localities, Shelley did not, like his contemporaries, 
compose his verse in an easy chair upon a well-carpeted floor, 
with a curtained window in front of his desk, letting in upon him 
vistas of beautiful scenery, while excluding the drenching rain 
or the oppressive glare of the heat ; neither did he compose 
his sea pictures, like Campbell, in a well-furnished room over- 
looking the waves, contenting himself with occasional glimpses 
of Neptune, through the double lens of his telescope. Shelley 
made his skiff, or the cavern, and when inland, the wood and 
the hedge copse, his study. Armed with pencil, and a book of 
blank paper, while a tempest was brewing in the black sky, or 
Nature lulled asleep in noontide sultriness, he would fling him- 
self into the heart of her tumult or repose, and dot down his 
conceptions as they came into his mind. In this manner he 
composed his " Revolt of Islam," with the Thames rocking his 
boat under the beeches of Marlow, and the "Witch of Atlas " 
while out in a pedestrian excursion to San Pelegrino. The 
" Prometheus Unbound " was similarly written while gazing on 
the fragments of the Roman world, seated on the plinths of the 
baths of Caracalla ; and the " Triumphs of Life," while gliding 
along the purple Mediterranean, or exploring by moonlight in 
his little shallop, the caves which fringe the rock-bound gulf 
of Spezia. Hence, Shelley's life was an eminently poetic life, 
as his philosophy was an eminently poetic philosophy. In the 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 245 

ardour with which he flung himself into the embraces of his art, 
in the rapt enthusiasm with which he drank in every aspect of 
the beautiful and the grand until it became a part of his being, 
in the yearning devotion with which he idolized Nature, and 
drenched himself with inspiration at her source, Shelley surpasses 
every other poet of whom history has left record. Had he 
lived in more classical times, he might have been sculptured 
as a tenth muse, with a globe and a lyre symbolizing the 
mysterious harmonies between the soul and the universe. 

The character of Shelley's poetry is just what might be ex- 
pected from this interfusion of a poetic life with a poetic 
philosophy. Of man's ways in society we get little, but of man 
in relation to his higher destinies, and of those aspects of the 
universe which throw light upon his nature in the abstract, we 
get everything. Shelley does not appear, in his poetry, to 
interest himself much about human concerns in any phase of 
society, except so far as they served to illustrate his peculiar 
views of human perfectibility. To sit down, like Scott, to ver- 
sify romantic stories for the amusement of his species, seemed 
to Shelley a degradation of his art. He felt the mantle of the 
seer and prophet upon him, endowing him with the power, 
through the instrumentality of the lyre, to awaken man from the 
depths of his degradation, to the beauty of that higher life which 
awaited him when escaped from the bonds of prejudice and 
custom. He obeyed no law, but the dictates of his reason 
and the pure impulses of his heart. Poetry was to Shelley the 
great lever by which men's minds were to be incited to the 
accomplishment of their moral regeneration. Hence, his prin- 
cipal pieces contain an actual foreshadowing of the change, a 
development of the reason upon which it was to be based, a 
presentiment of the forces by which it was to be brought about. 
He seems to have regarded his art, even more than the old 
Greek dramatist, as a species of revelation, unveiling man's 
relation with the infinite, and befitting him for the subjugation 
of evil in others, by the extinction of selfishness in himself. In 



246 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

this respect, the only modern poet who approaches him is 
Wordsworth. But Wordsworth's convictions were singularly 
wanting in unity of purpose, mingling a little bit of Alexan- 
drianism here, and a little bit of the Thirty-nine Articles there, 
dovetailing a strange regard for liberal institutions abroad, with 
a strong aversion to them at home, until the whole structure of 
his teaching resembled a piece of tesselated mosaic, rather 
curious to look at, but utterly unsafe to stand upon. But Shelley's 
principles were pre-eminently harmonious and self-coherent. He 
carried his philosophical system, with logical sequence, into 
man's social relations, until the universal spirit of love and 
liberty, pervading all organic laws, became also paramount in 
the political structures of society ; and these views, interlacing 
nature and human institutions in one consentaneous framework, 
he enforced with a flood of poetry so unsurpassingly grand in 
its effulgence, so abstract and spiritual in its loveliness, that if 
it failed to enchant all hearts, the defect is to be ascribed to the 
obtuseness of the popular mind to the metaphysical distinc- 
tions in which his conceptions were enshrined, and not to the 
conceptions themselves, or to the shaping of that imaginative 
power in which he surpassed all his contemporaries. Shelley's 
unpopularity arose from the fact, not so much that he was 
obscure, but that the national mind was dull. The old Greek 
dramatist was a grand intellectual force in his time ; but to the 
modern reader, the old Greek dramatist, with his views about 
fate and destiny, his elemental deities, and his abstract personi- 
fications is about as uninteresting and unintelligible a personage 
as he can cope with. He is the poet of the past. In the same 
manner, Shelley imaged a state of society and built his views 
upon a system of human perfectibility, which can only be con- 
templated by an inversion of everything which absorbs the 
interest of the present. He is the poet of the future. It would, 
therefore, be manifestly unfair to judge of either in reference to 
the tastes of an age incapable of fathoming the recesses of their 
thoughts j or to test the quality of their genius by any other 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 247 

standard than the fitness of that genius to represent the peculiar 
views of which they were the exponents. 

The " Revolt of Islam," the only narrative poem Shelley wrote 
of any length, is invested with an apocalyptic character. An 
abscess had formed on Shelley's lungs. His physician only 
gave him a few months to live. He resolved to employ 
that time on some great work which would convey to pos- 
terity his own views of how their redemption was to be 
effected, and in what manner the first apostles of the new 
scheme of ideal regeneration were to meet their fate. But 
like all apocalyptic writings, these views are conveyed to us 
through a series of dreams, or rapt visions, which set the com- 
prehension of ordinary readers, as well as the rules of art, 
at defiance. He imagines two lovers in Turkish Greece im- 
pelling, by the ardour of their genius, the population to cast off 
the yoke of their tyrants, and inaugurate for their species a 
new reign of love and benevolence. They momentarily suc- 
ceed in the attempt, but not before the hero has been left for 
dead, and the heroine driven to frenzy by the embraces of a 
master whom she loathed. Their final victory, however, is 
only achieved to be overthrown by a combination of foreign 
despots. The lovers, after a few days of ecstatic intercourse, 
give themselves up to the conquerors, and are burnt alive. 
Their death, however, is phenomenal only. Shelley introduces 
them to us in the supernal world, of which this is but a shadow, 
enjoying the rapturous feast of bliss, a foretaste of which they 
had struggled to secure for humanity. There is, consequently, 
a greater unity about the piece than at first sight might appear. 
It may be regarded as a sort of apocalypse to the Alexandrine 
philosophy. It opens and it terminates in the ante-natal and 
posthumous world. The actions of Laon and Cythna are 
revealed to us in a series of visions, representing the force of 
intellectual conviction and moral truth over the minds of men. 
The outside world is phantasmal only, and is dealt with as such. 
Human action is represented of such stuff as dreams are made 



248 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

of. The only abiding realities are spiritual truths, and that 
fervent mingling of soul with soul which is expressed by the 
word love. Hence, Shelley's conviction that, against these 
two breastplates, the tyrants' sword and the bigot's hate were 
destined early to prove powerless for ever. 

Tried by the ordinary rules of art, perhaps, no poem, in any 
language,' contains so many beauties, mingled with so many 
preposterous blemishes, as the " Revolt of Islam." The inci- 
dents are few, and those of a character to shock all notions of 
reality. Shelley seems to have had an idea that mankind were 
to be instigated, by a simple discourse, to rise in a body against 
the whole established structure of society, and overthrow in an 
hour the building which had taken decades of centuries to 
construct. A few words from the lips of a vagrant girl were 
sufficient to make a whole generation rise up against their old 
habits and prejudices, to break asunder the iron links of pre- 
scription and usage, out of some fancied dream of realizing, 
in a moment, the dream of general communism of property 
and universal brotherhood of love. The French revolution 
seems to have put into his head fancies of this nature. But 
the French revolution had its origin in grinding taxation, the 
oppression of the nobles, the exactions of the court, as well as 
in the writings of two or three generations of bold spirits, each 
waxing warmer in tone and more unbridled in expression, 
until the focus was reached of that fire which lifted society 
from the foundation upon which it had rested for centuries. 
But the complex action of these causes was far different from 
the wild ravings of a woman, to whose simple words the poet 
attributes efforts for transcending anything ascribed to the 
apostles of Rome, or the sibyls of Greece. It is no less mar- 
vellous when whole troops of ferocious men are proceeding to 
glut their revenge in the blood of their tyrants, that they should 
be turned aside from the act, by having their minds directed to 
its inutility ; or to find infuriated slaves, armed to the teeth, 
changed into docile lambs, by being allowed to escape punish- 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 249 

ment for their crimes. It is unfortunate that Shelley should have 
reduced into action his Quixotic ideas as to the effect of charity 
and magnanimity of spirit upon depraved multitudes to so great 
an extent as to have built up a great poem upon the notion, that 
the Spanish knight's method of freeing criminals from their 
chains, and turning them loose on society, was the best way to 
regenerate his species. 

If Laon's " Experiences " are too visionary for belief, those 
of Cythna, the heroine of the story, surpass all the marvels of 
Arabian fiction. How, in a frenzy, she is transported from the 
Harem, by a diver who conducts her to a cave beneath the 
rocks of the sea, where she is fed by an eagle ; and how she is 
lifted up again by an earthquake, upon a rock in the centre of 
the bleak ocean, — all this extravagance, I conjecture, must be 
taken to be nothing but the wild incoherency of her thoughts ; 
but it is interwoven with the main action of the poem, 
wherein it only ought to have been mortised as an episode. 
The child, which is the fruit of the Harem adventure, and 
which cuts a conspicuous figure in the sea-cave, connects 
the tyrant of the golden city with Cythna, and forms a 
further link in the unity of the piece, by committing suicide 
at the funeral pile of the two lovers, in order to join 
them in the next world. Poets have a licence to play tricks 
with nature, whenever they deal in enchantments, or call into 
action the weird powers. But this interweaving of dreams 
with imaginative pictures, this piling of vision upon vision, 
without any solid substratum to support the cloudy fabric, 
utterly destroys verisimilitude, and with it everything like human 
interest in the characters of the poem. Could we take the story 
out of its unreal framework and interweave the actors with a 
plot of flesh and blood creation, this poem would outshine any 
other of similar extent in the language. But as it stands, its 
beauties gleam upon us, across its airy cloud-rack, like the 
fitful sun-light on an April day. The hopes of freedom's dawn 
thus shoot their vivid streaks across the night of slavery, which 



. ■ ■ ' " . ■ ■ I. ■ ■» . A , V 



250 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

is represented as winter wearing upon its slumbering face a 
dream of spring : — 

' Such are the thoughts which, like the fires that glare 

In storm-encompassed isles, we cherish yet 
In this dark ruin. Such were mine even there ; 

As in its sleep some odorous violet, 
While yet its leaves with nightly dews are wet, 

Breathes in prophetic dreams of day's uprise, 
Or as ere Scythian frost in fear has met 

Spring's messengers descending from the skies, 
The buds foreknow their life — this hope must ever rise.' * 

The picture of Cythna who wanders with Laon, 

Where earth and ocean meet 
Beyond the aerial mountains, whose vast cells 

The unreposing billows ever beat, 
Through forests wide and old, and lawny dells 

Where boughs of incense droop over the emerald wells, f 

will hold its own against any other in the language : — 

' She moved upon this earth a shape of brightness, 

A power, that from its objects scarcely drew 
One impulse of her being — in her lightness 

Most like some radiant cloud of morning dew, 
Which wanders through the waste air's pathless blue, 

To nourish some far desert ; she did seem 
Beside me, gathering beauty as she grew, 

Like the bright shade of some immortal dream 
Which walks, when tempest sleeps, the wave of life's dark stream.' £ 

The passion of Laon and Cythna has a radiance flung around 
it of fiery depth and splendour which reveal all the glowing 
ardour of the poet's nature : — 

' The meteor showed the leaves on which we sate ; 

And Cythna's glowing arms, and the thick ties 
Of her soft hair, which bent with gathered weight 

My neck near hers ; her dark and deepening eyes 

* C. vii., st. 37. t C. vi., st. 25. % C. ii., st. 23. 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 251 

Which (as twin phantoms of one star that lies 
O'er a dim well, move, though the star reposes, ) 

Swam in our mute and liquid ecstasies ; 

Her marble brow, and eager lips, like roses, 

With their own fragrance pale, which Spring but half uncloses. ' 

' The meteor to its far morass returned : 

The beating of our veins one interval 
Made still ; and then I felt the blood that burned 

Within her frame, mingle with mine, and fall 
Around my heart like fire ; and over all 

A mist was spread, the sickness of a deep 
And speechless swoon of joy, as might befall 

Two disunited spirits when they leap 
In union from this earth's obscure and fading sleep. ' * 



' Her lips were parted, and the measured breath 

Was now heard there ; — her dark and intricate eyes 
Orb within orb, deeper than sleep or death, 

Absorbed the glories of the burning skies, • 
Which, mingling with her heart's deep ecstasies, 

Burst from her looks and gestures ; — and a light 
Of liquid tenderness, like love, did rise 

From her whole frame, — an atmosphere which quite 
Arrayed her in its beams, tremulous, and soft, and bright. ' 

' She would have clasped me to her glowing frame ; 

Those warm and odorous lips might soon have shed 
On mine the fragrance and the invisible flame 

Which now the cold winds stole ; — she would have laid 
Upon my languid heart her dearest head ; 

I might have heard her voice, tender and sweet : 
Her eyes mingling with mine, might soon have fed 

My soul with their own joy. — One moment yet 
I gazed — we parted then, never agairi to meet.' + 

Beauties of this sort abound in the poem, and when we consider 
the ethereal light in which even its tamest parts are steeped, 
and the fire and vigour with which the whole is executed, the 

* C. vi., sts. 34, 35. t C. xi., srs. 5, 6. 



ftr*» 



252 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

regret is doubly felt that conceptions, which, if united with a 
better ground-plan, would have been as familiar to us as house- 
hold words, should, as they stand gilding an unnatural fabric, 
promise to be the least popular of any in our literature. 

The " Revolt of Islam " represented a defeat, which Shelley 
believed would be but temporary; for it was no part of his creed 
that vice and misery would always be in the ascendant in this 
world, that the great bulk of mankind would be for ever ex- 
cluded from their inheritance, but that in the end, humanity 
would rise triumphant over most of the evils by which it is, at 
present, assailed. Wars would cease, diseases be exterminated, 
superstition banished, kingcraft abolished, crime annihilated, 
and man rejoice in the plenitude of moral truth, of paternal 
concord, and intellectual freedom. This change in the human 
world would be attended by a sort of palcegenesis, with a cor- 
responding change in the animal and terrestrial world. Every 
thing would cast off its evil nature as an outworn garment, 
and bask in the universal reign of love. Shelley seems to 
have been prepossessed with the idea that man only need to 
resume his own perfectibility, to ensure the universal triumph 
of good in the outward universe. The wild and predatory 
animals would either disappear, or transmute their fierce into 
gentle natures. Poisonous plants would become healthy, and 
noxious elements sound. The atmosphere would refuse to 
suck in pestilence, and no blasts would strike sterility into the 
womb of the earth. As before the pre-historic period, races 
existed in' harmony with the totally different state of climate, 
and vegetation then existing- so if man were to undergo a 
change in his moral faculties, a corresponding change might be 
expected to follow in his physical condition, and both would 
necessitate a revolution in the spiritual and physical elements 
of the universe. As long as man, the highest product of 
creation, is rotten, the whole structure must be proportionally 
infirm ; but make him sound, and the surrounding elements 
will partake of the perfection embodied in their loftiest manifesta- 



W*r ft - 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 253 

tion. At least such is the scheme which the " Prometheus Un- 
bound " presents to us ; and though the conception of the drama 
is derived from yEschylus, yet so different is Shelley's manner of 
treatment, to such an extent has he enlarged the boundaries of 
his subject, that it comes before us with the freshness of an 
original performance. According to the old story, Prometheus, 
for endowing the outcast race of men with the possession of 
the arts, was chained to a rock, and condemned by Jupiter to 
have his entrails gnawed by vultures, though he had assisted 
that potentate to usurp the throne of Olympus, from which Jove 
and Kronos had formerly expelled Saturn. It was evidently the 
design of iEschylus, when Hercules, in the further expansion 
of the drama, by the order of the Fates, unboudn Prometheus, 
to reconcile the justice of Jupiter with the punishment he 
had ungratefully inflicted upon an ally : for the father of God 
and men, whose usurpation was always represented by the 
poets as the establishment of order and anarchy, could not 
be supposed to have been represented, at their religious rites, 
as a ferocious tyrant. But Shelley seized upon the story as 
typical of the evils which humanity was undergoing from 
the rule of the present supposed god of the universe, who 
had usurped the place of Saturn, that is, of the spirit of 
universal love actuating the form of intellectual beauty. The 
usurper, drunk with excess of power, marries Thetis, and she 
gives birth to a hero who frees the human race, personified 
in Prometheus, from the numerous hosts of evils preying on his 
vitals, and restores the golden reign of Saturn with all the 
paradisal bliss from which man had been so ruthlessly excluded. 
Such are the outlines of the picture which Shelley has filled up 
with the most gorgeous poetry. Though the ordinary reader 
may fail to realize his acute metaphysical distinctions, or 
to bring the elemental power which he has endued with 
living forms within the regions of flesh and blood, still it 
cannot be denied, with all their cloudland dreaminess and 
shadow, they are more real in their way than the allegorical 



-!***- 



254 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

personifications of Spenser, and subserve a more practical 
purpose as the exponents of a deep philosophy. They are the 
outward embodiments of vital forces which are intimately 
blended with the destinies of man. As such, the truthfulness 
of the conceptions must be tested by a reference to the ideas 
they are intended to convey, and the functions of those ideas 
in bringing about the changes they are designed to illustrate. In 
this respect, there can hardly be a doubt that Shelley ascended 
to the height of his subject. His embodiments are instinct 
with life. Their beauty is only such. as could be caught by the 
rapt vision of a poet's eye. The marvellous groupings of his 
figures would suck the soul out of a sculptor. While their deep 
tenderness remind us of the faces of Raphael's madonnas, their 
voluptuous forms are hardly surpassed by the outlines of Titian 
himself. Nature dawns upon us in a series of spiritual visions, 
combining regions of fairy loveliness with the broad outlines of 
a philosophy, which aims at realizing all the magical colouring 
of the poet's visions, in the sphere of truth. That Shelley in 
his "Prometheus," as well as in his " Hellas," with reference to 
the poetry of his subject, and its ground-plan in the region 
of abstract thought, surpasses ^Eschylus, few, I think, would be 
disposed to deny ; but yEschylus wrote for an audience who felt 
their own fortunes, and the folds of their social and religious 
life, indissolubly blent with the poet's conceptions, and who, on 
that account, could grasp them as substantial existences ; but 
Shelley, for an audience, who regarded his conceptions as the 
airy phantoms of a dream, never likely to be realized. Hence, 
while the triumphs of the one are stereotyped in history, those 
of the other only exist in the mind of the metaphysician. 

Had Shelley never descended into the regions of actual fact, 
it might have remained doubtful whether he could have con- 
structed a story appealing powerfully to human interests with 
any success. But in the " Cenci" he has tested his strength in 
the highest walk of modern dramatic art, with a result un- 
equalled since the days of Marlowe and Shakespeare. The 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 255 

interest is powerfully sustained to the end. The action never 
flags. The characters are as boldly conceived as they are 
accurately executed. The daring and fiend-like determination 
of Francesco, the timid and vacillating purposes of the 
brother, the ruffianism of Orsino, are all so many foils to set 
off Beatrice, the grand impersonation of sublime despair, whose 
purity sheds a halo of heroism round the fearful act she nerves 
others to perform as the only plank of escape from moral 
pollution. Now these characters are drawn in the most natural 
manner in the world. They do not rant or mouth fine senti- 
ments unconnected with natural outburst of passion, or with 
the development of the plot, simply to show the author's poetic 
powers. Their words, as well as their acts, are simply such as 
would be expected from people of similar disposition, sur- 
rounded by similar circumstances. There is not a line of waste 
writing in the piece. The writer has made the characters 
unfold themselves, not from their language, but from their acts, 
while these are none other than are required for the natural 
development of the story in crystalline clearness and complete- 
ness. In the hands of Shakespeare, the plot would have 
assumed a wider basis. The facetious element would have 
been introduced, in which Shelley was woefully deficient. 
There would have been more grandeur in some parts, and 
more turgidity in others. But I hardly think the story would 
have been better told, or the characters more truthfully drawn. 
It is a marvel that Shelley, who never appears to have bestowed 
any study upon the Elizabethan dramatists, should in this, his 
first attempt, have equalled all but the foremost of them in that 
species of composition which he had designedly neglected, but 
upon which they had concentrated all their genius. 

'That Shelley evinced no lack of power in dealing with 
objects of human interest when he allowed such to enthral his 
nature, is evinced by many of his smaller pieces, most of 
which are gems of surpassing beauty, whose lustre is rather 
likely to be enhanced than to suffer by comparison with any 



256 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

other kindred productions in the language. For while, in these 
pieces, the actual is never lost sight of, it is robed with such 
ideal imagery as makes the material float in the splendours of 
spiritual creation. A rich light permeates every object, until 
the substantial form seems but the shadow of an ethereal 
element. The death of poor Keats, at once struck all the 
chords of his heart. The result was a monody which, for 
depth of feeling, for exquisite pathos, for the beautiful embodi- 
ments of the powers of nature, draped in the hues of a subtle 
philosophy, is unsurpassed in any literature. The " Adonais " may 
challenge comparison with "Lycidas," even in plaintive melody, 
or naive grace and tender simplicity. In every other quality 
Milton would be the first to admit his rival's superiority. The 
" Ode to the Skylark," and the lines on " Dejection in the Bay 
of Naples," evince his power in clothing mere sensations with 
grand imagery, whether excited by visions of joy, or tossed upon 
the rack of despair. His love ditties are the incarnation of 
passionate tenderness suffused with deep melancholy, so that 
we are perplexed to know which feeling is uppermost, or how 
so much joy and sadness can be intermingled without destroying 
each other. In the " Alastor," and the "Epipsychidion," the 
yearning of the soul after ideal beauty, both in feminine as well 
as in material creation, is imaged forth, with depth of fervour 
and a gorgeousness of colouring which presents a true image 
of the poet's life. Assuredly, if Shelley was wanting so often 
in making the inconstant play of the passions the burthen of 
his song, it was not for lack of capacity, but from his conviction 
that the muse ought to aim at the nobler flight of filching from 
heaven that light which was to unriddle the mysteries of creation. 
It can hardly, however, be maintained that Shelley was equal 
to the production of a grand representative poem, like " Don 
Juan," for instance, as he wanted the humorous element, with- 
out which any adequate representation of the conflicting 
interests of human life is clearly impossible. He also wanted 
that intimate experience with the world and its affairs, which 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 257 

alone can enable men to stereotype its pictures in the vivid 
imagery of expression. Even this is apparent in his delineation 
of love, in which the human, is always submerged in the ideal, 
tints of the passion. Shelley was the child of spirituality. The 
real world with its conventual forms, and its apparent absence 
of deep emotional sympathies, was entirely foreign to his 
nature. He did not take the pains to master it ; it is, there- 
fore, very much doubted whether he possessed the power. In 
this respect, he appears in disadvantageous contrast to Lord 
Byron, who entered into the spirit of social phenomena, and 
showed the depths of feeling in all their shivering nakedness, 
which it was the object of conventional forms to conceal. 
Shelley, doubtless, did not think the follies of society worth 
unmasking, while there was higher game to fly at. But Byron 
riots in the process, until the laying bare the manifold hypo- 
crisies of custom, became the god of his intellectual life. 

Byron and Shelley were, in most respects, the antithesis of each 
other ; and had they not felt themselves linked together in 
one common fate, as the victims of the prejudices of their 
countrymen, as well as by congenial pursuits, the marvel would 
have been that characters so opposite could have cherished 
lasting sympathy for each other. Shelley always manifested a 
universal spirit of love for his kind ; Byron a universal spirit 
of hatred. The nature of Shelley was all sweetness ; that of 
Byron all bitterness. The one had a logical series of convic- 
tions, self-coherent and harmonious, which he enforced at all 
times upon everybody with whom he came into contact ; 
the other had no belief whatever, but doubted of everything 
except the existence of evil. Shelley had little satire or face- 
tiousness in his disposition ; Byron was, by turns, caustic and 
humourous. Shelley steeped the material world in the colours 
of the ideal ; Byron, the ideal world in the colours of the 
material. Shelley believed that everything was pure at 
its birth, and had gone wrong by accident, but only, in the 
order of time, to be restored to its original goodness ; Byron 

17 



258 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

believed that everything was radically wrong, by evil engendered 
in its nature, and would so continue to the end of the chapter. 
Byron exercised his art to amuse or astonish, Shelley to 
instruct and purify, his species. There can be no doubt in 
nearly all these points of contrast, the advantage is with 
Shelley. In poetic power, I do not know, except in the two 
classes of satire, and the representative poem, that he is inferior 
to his great contemporary. In the lyrical, as well as historical 
drama, Byron could not even approach him. If Byron had 
the advantage in the reproduction of actual passion, Shelley 
triumphs in self-sustained ideal power. Byron accomplished 
more, because he lived the longer. But it appears to me that 
Shelley evinced the grander poetic capacity. It is, also, only 
fair to consider that Shelley helped Byron to much of his ideal 
splendour, while his noble friend could not return the gift by 
inoculating Shelley with his world-wide experience. 

Notwithstanding Byron's hostility to most of the institutions 
of his country, in his delineations of human passion, and his 
pictures of human life, he appealed to a large public who re- 
sponded to his efforts by grand ovations of applause. But 
Shelley was unsustained by any sympathizing audience : even 
the most ethereal of his productions fell like dead fruit, un- 
heeded to the ground. It was not that he enshrined his 
thoughts in the garb of a metaphysical philosophy; but he ap- 
peared to take a pleasure in representing his opinions to be as 
divergent from the popular creed as possible, as if it were a 
point with him to encounter the most virulent opposition, — to 
reap the widest harvest of disgust. His belief in a spirit of 
beauty and design, impregnating every part of the universe, 
and pre-determining everything for good, might have saved him 
from the stigma of atheism which he so resolutely brought upon 
himself. His view of the perfectibility of man being connected 
with the perfectibility of the universe, is, after all, but the 
direct counterpart of the doctrine of the Fall, which represents 
nature as rising in rebellion against man, as soon as man rose 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 259 

in rebellion against himself. The ardour with which Shelley 
looked forward to the extinction of evil, was only another exem- 
plification of that yearning for the millennium which many 
enthusiastic divines believe will be brought about by other 
means. Shelley's views of the moral law, differed little, if 
anything, from the doctrines of the New Testament. Indeed, 
it would not be difficult to show that most of the views pro- 
pounded by Shelley, had some analogy or kinship with those 
entertained by the orthodox of his day ; the only difference being 
that both believed in the same agency under varying forms, and 
sought the final results by the employment of different factors. 
But Shelley had imbibed with his Alexandrian notions, enough, if 
not all, of that hostility to Christianity, manifested by the cultiva- 
tors of the old philosophy to the nascent creed, which first pur- 
sued that philosophy to temporary destruction, and then applied 
its dead forms to leaven much of its new spirit. But Shelley 
was not the man to learn anything from so ghastly a source as 
history. He therefore encountered Christianity with the same 
virulence, as if this amalgamation had not taken place, — as if 
Proclus was still writing the Enneades, and Celsus was still 
thundering his indignation against Gregory Nazienzen. By 
this means he not only aroused useless antagonism, but 
prevented himself from sympathizing with much that was 
beautiful in the past, and many sources of spiritual loveliness 
which animated the present. The area of his aesthetic views 
was narrowed in proportion. Though most lavish in his 
charities, he appears to have had but a faint conception of 
the virtues arising from that proper discipline of the passions, 
which Christianity had impressed upon the world. If the 
popular belief inculcated a sage restraint in the cultivation 
of -chastity, I fear that would have been reason enough with 
Shelley for counselling indulgence. 

Shelley's views with regard to the relations which ought to 
exist between the two sexes, were doubtless imbibed, like most 
of his other notions respecting society, from Plato's Republic. 



260 ESTIMA TE OF 1 MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Those relations he would have established upon the widest 
freedom consistent with man's moral development. No union, 
in his view, was legitimate unless based upon the mutual 
affection of both parties. When the bond of sympathy was 
broken, no matter whether on the part of both, or either, the 
union was dissolved in reality, and ought not to be allowed to 
drag on, after its soul was dead, a wretched legal existence. 
All forms of prostitution, all commingling of the sexes, which 
had mere convenience or lechery for its basis, Shelley regarded 
with the utmost aversion ; but when love had struck root in 
the tender feelings of the heart, — when it had taken up its home 
in the recesses of the soul, and generated from thence mutual 
fires, he was so prepossessed with the notion, of its right to pro- 
ceed to any length it pleased, in defiance of present responsibili- 
ties or former engagements, that with his usual disingenuousness, 
he not only did not scruple to reduce the theory to practice, 
but introduced it into his domestic establishment. To some 
such source is to be ascribed those mistakes in his matrimonial 
connections, which threw such a blight over his subsequent 
career. His first wife was, doubtless, not so well suited to 
sympathize with his pursuits as Miss Godwin. Yet it was on 
this slender ground that Shelley thought himself justified in 
leaving her in an advanced stage of pregnancy, after she had 
borne him one child, in order to cohabit with another woman. 
Had there been a wide-growing estrangement, threatening a 
breach between the parties, this ungracious step would not 
have been without some excuse. But dates and documentary 
evidence are against this supposition. Shelley, after marrying 
Harriett Westbrook, in Holland, in 1811, went through a 
second marriage with that lady, in March, 1814, to legitimate 
the offspring in the eye of English law. Hardly four months 
after that act, he left England with Miss Godwin, whose 
acquaintance he had formed in the interim. From such facts, 
there can be only one inference, that Shelley thought every man 
entitled to abandon the partner whom he had apparently 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 261 

selected for life, upon meeting with another more congenial to 
his tastes ; having, of course, made his first wife a suitable pro- 
vision for her maintenance. The subsequent suicide which fol- 
lowed, after the return of the newly-engaged parties to England, 
when the connection began to assume the firmness of adamant, 
we are assured, was brought about by causes in which Shelley 
had no concern whatever. But who can dive into the recesses 
of a mind distracted with its own sorrows, and pretend to sepa- 
rate the entangled skein of motives so clearly as to enable him 
to say, these and these only led to the perpetration of the dire 
result ? 

A direct cause, or the causa causans of the calamity, the God- 
win connection may not have been, but that it was the indirect 
cause, that is, one of the agents leading up to it, and without 
which the mischief could not possibly have happened, no one 
will be surely bold enough to deny. Such, indeed, appears to 
have been Shelley's view, as the rash act cast a profound gloom 
over his closing years, and filled his love strains with that sad- 
ness which reminds us of Ophelia's love dirge, as she was sink- 
ing with her rose-wreath into the embrace of death. The " Invo- 
cation to Misery," the beautiful " Ode to the Future," and some 
lines of heart-breaking tenderness over a life separation, which 
Shelley's editors have had the bad taste to inscribe to Harriet 
Grove, a casual sweetheart of his boyhood, were all written 
under a keen sense of the misfortune which his levity, or the 
practical embodiment of his theories, had brought upon him. 
Could Shelley have foreseen the consequence, he was too feel- 
ing a man not even to have sacrificed his own happiness, than 
entail wretchedness upon those whom he had sworn to shelter 
from its pangs. But with his peculiar convictions, he, doubtless, 
blamed society rather than himself, for the result, by fostering 
in woman, through its Draconian marriage laws, that chastity of 
principle, which regards fixity of tenure in wedlock, as the only 
foundation of her future happiness. Shelley may have, doubt- 
less, reasoned himself into the conviction that he was doing his 



262 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

wife, no less than society, a service, by overturning a principle 
in his own person, which both mistook for the corner-stone of 
their security, but which was to him the perennial source of 
misery and pollution. He did not, therefore, go the wrong way 
with the torch pointing out the right way. He erred, as 
the best of us will assuredly err, when the promptings of the 
heart assume the guise of intellectual convictions. Unmiti- 
gated selfishness would never have led Shelley astray, had it 
not come to him in the form of an angel of light ; and the 
reader may stand over his grave — as the writer has done, when 
the violets of the early Roman spring were steeping his dust in 
living fragrance — with the feeling that humanity has rarely en- 
shrined a purer or loftier spirit. 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 263 



WITHIN view of Shelley's grave, rests the dust of Keats 
It seems fitting that men so akin to each other in 
spirit, should rest side by side. For they were united in the 
same belief in human perfectibility, in the same antagonism to 
the public institutions of their time. They drew their inspira- 
tion from the same fountain — the undying beauty of the world's 
youth, as imaged in the creations of antique Greece. The 
souls of each seemed kindled with flame lit direct from the 
altar of the gods. Both re-embodied the old divinities. 
Steeped in the light of their genius, the denizens of Olympus 
no longer appeared abstract personifications of some par- 
ticular quality, but actual flesh-and-blood creations, with 
sympathies as keen, with affections as glowing as our own. 
The aim of both was to invest earth with the spiritual light 
of Elysium, to companion man with the divinities, to restore 
the links of that philosophy which, viewing every atom as 
a manifestation of spirit, in a higher or lower form, bound 
up the universe in one reciprocal bond of mutual relation- 
ship and dependance. To them the old conception of the 
elemental powers seemed the best expression of the invisible 
agencies presiding over the destinies of creation. The times 
for which Julian had sighed, almost appeared to have come 
back again. The deities of Greece stepped from their pedestals 
once more to converse with mortals. Heaven appeared a part 
of earth, as earth appeared the fore-court of heaven. 

With Wordsworth, poetry was a philosophy. But with 



264 EST1MA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Shelley and Keats it was both a philosophy and a religion. 
But Shelley seems to have arrived at his results by processes of 
reasoning, Keats by flights of his imagination. With Shelley, 
truth always appeared as the spirit of beauty. But Keats saw 
in beauty the spirit of truth. He had no idea of truth apart 
from the imaginative element, as something locked up under 
the control of the logical faculty. The spirit of beauty mani- 
festing itself in the outer harmonies of things, appeared to him 
only a reflex of the operations of the same spirit in the invisible 
sphere ; and he thought its results could be far more easily 
fathomed by the imagination, than by any ratiocinative process 
whatever. Indeed, I very much doubt whether Keats did not 
think forms of reasoning, with respect to their competency to 
conduct men into the interior labyrinths of the universe, as 
forms of delusion. The old Greek, therefore, who lent wings 
to his fancy, when he wanted to account for natural phenomena, 
appeared to Keats a far more sensible personage than the 
modern philosopher, who applies the scale and compass to 
unveil the mysteries of creation. For the one only accounts 
for the transient and merely apparent action of delusive atoms 
of matter upon each other, whereas the other seizes hold of 
principles as permanent as they are real, and embodies them 
in effulgent forms, to supply and preserve in us the qualities of 
which they are the living exponents. If these forms did not exist 
except as symbols of the qualities which animated them, that 
appeared to Keats a very small matter, so long as their actions 
shadowed forth the operation of the qualities of which they 
were the embodiment, in the scheme of the universe. To that 
extent, at least, to Keats they were true. Now, of these qualities, 
love appeared the animating principle, as beauty was the exter- 
nal form ; and the object of Keats' chief poem appears to have 
been to seek out further instances of these symbolised truths, re- 
vealing still deeper glimpses into this intimate alliance between 
love and beauty, in the actual relations of things, and thus 
light up the material with the splendours of the ideal universe : — 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 265 

Ye deaf and senseless minutes of the day, 
And thou, old forest, hold ye this for true, 
There is no lightning, no authentic dew 
But in the eye of love : there's not a sound, 
Melodious howsoever, can confound 
The heavens and earth in one to such a death 
As doth the voice of love : there's not a breath 
Will mingle kindly with the meadow air, 
Till it has panted round, and stolen a share 
Of passion from the heart. * 

That there was a link between the sympathy of the elements 
for each other, and that existing between human beings, Keats 
not only believed, but hints that the one could not go on with- 
out the other : — 

Who, of men, can tell 
That flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would swell 
To melting pulp ; that fish would have bright mail, 
The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale, 
The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones, 
The seed its harvest, or the lute its tones, 
Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet, 
If human souls did never kiss and greet ? f 

It is when diving deep into those secret relations between 
the different ranks of creation, free from the conditions under 
which the laws of intuition are exercised, that we get beyond 
the cheating appearances of things, and live like disembodied 
spirits in the very heart of the universe : — 

Wherein lies happiness ? In that which becks 

Our ready minds, to fellowship divine, 

A fellowship with essence, till we shine, 

Full alchemised and free of space. Behold 

The clear religion of heaven ! Fold 

A rose-leaf round thy finger's taperness, 

And soothe thy lips : hist ! when the airy stress 

Of Music's kiss impregnates the free winds, 

* "Endymion," b. iv., Is. 153—163. t Ibid, b. i. 



266 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

And with a sympathetic touch unbinds 
Eolian magic from their lucid wombs ; 
Then old songs waken from enclouded tombs, 
Old ditties sigh above their father's grave ; 
Ghosts of melodious prophesyings rave 
Round every spot where trod Apollo's foot ; 
Bronze clarions awake, and faintly bruit, 
Where long ago a giant-battle was ; 
And from the turf, a lullaby doth pass 
In every place where infant Orpheus slept. 
Feel we these things ? that moment have we stept 
Into a sort of oneness, and our state 
Is like a floating spirit. * 

As love with Keats is the great bond which binds together 
the different orders of creation, so in the little world of man, it 
is the only feature which claims eternal remembrance, no less 
in the history of the human race than in the experience of each 
private individual. Battles, sieges, and political or religious 
revolutions, are mere lumber in the chamber of history, being 
completely overshadowed by feats of love, which can alone 
rivet our attention, while deeds of rapine and social convulsion 
fast sink into oblivion :— 

O sovereign power of love ! O grief ! O balm ! 

All records, saving thine, come cool, and calm, 

And shadowy, through the mist of passed years : 

For others, good or bad, hatred and tears 

Have become indolent ; but touching thine, 

One sigh doth echo, one poor sob doth pine, 

One kiss brings honey-dew from buried days. 

The woes of Troy, towers smouldering o'er their blaze, 

Stiff-holden shields, far-piercing spears, keen blades, 

Struggling, and blood, and shrieks — all dimly fades 

Into some backward corner of the brain ; 

Yet, in our very souls, we feel amain 

The close of Troilus and Cressid sweet. 

Hence, pageant history ! hence, gilded cheat ! 

Swart planet in the universe of deeds ! 

Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds 

* "Endymion,"b. i. 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 267 

Along the pebbled shore of memory ! 

Many old rotten -timber'd boats there be 

Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified 

To goodly vessels ; many a sail of pride, 

And golden keel'd, is left unlaunch'd and dry. 

But wherefore this ? What care, though owl did fly 

About the great Athenian admiral's mast ? 

What care, though striding Alexander past 

The Indus with his Macedonian numbers ? 

Though old Ulysses tortured from his slumbers 

The glutted Cyclops, what care ? Juliet leaning 

Amid her window -flowers, — sighing, — weaning 
Tenderly her fancy from its maiden snow, 
Doth more avail than these : the silver flow 
Of Hero's tears, the swoon of Imogen, 
Fair Pastorella in the bandit's den, 
Are things to brood on with more ardency 
Than the death-day of empires. Fearfully 
Must such conviction come upon his head, 
Who, thus far, discontent, has dared to tread, 
Without one muse's smile, or kind behest, 
The path of love and poesy. But rest, 
In chaffing restlessness, is yet more drear 
Than to be crush'd, in striving to uprear 
Love's standard on the battlements of song. 
So once more days and nights aid me along, 
Like legion'd soldiers.* 

The plot of " Endymion," if, indeed, there is any sequence of 
events in the poem worthy of that name, brings the Latmian 
shepherd in contact with the loves of Venus and Adonis, of 
Alpheus and Arethusa, of Glaucus and Scylla, while the hero 
himself is pursuing his adventures with Diana. These, for the 
most part, are given in a series of visions. But the waking ex- 
periences of Endymion are so wild and romantic, and are so 
interwoven with his visionary ones, that it is difficult to say 
where the one ends, or the other begins. He descends into the 
sparry hollows of the earth, where cupids have the care of sleeping 
Adonis, whom Venus comes to rouse from his winter sleep, and 
* " Endymion," b. ii. 



268 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

transport into the skies, for summer dalliance. After riding be- 
tween the wings of an eagle to a jasmine bower, for another 
dreaming dalliance with Diana, Endymion is transported to the 
palace of Olympus, upon a fiery courser, where he makes the ac- 
quaintance of the numerous household of Jupiter. On this j ourney 
he is accompanied by Diana, who leads him into the belief that 
she is an Indian waif from the train of Bacchus, and having in that 
capacity ensnared his affections, she, by some magical slight, 
appears to him in a vision to tax him with unfaithfulness, while 
he is couched in the Olympian hall, with the Indian waif whose 
form she had previously assumed. Endymion, perplexed be- 
tween the Indian lady and the vision, is relieved from his con- 
flicting loves by Diana dissolving into thin air. But this adventure, 
with respect to the marvellous, is surpassed by Endymion's 
visit to the roots of the ocean, where he assists Glaucus in re- 
viving the dead bodies whom the waves had entombed, and 
transforming them into sea ministrants for the service of Nep- 
tune. As far as wonders go, Endymion's adventures exceed 
those of Astolfo, but the whole is shrined in so sensuous a phi- 
losophy, and is so deeply infused with the passion which more 
than any other engrosses human thought, that the sense of the 
marvellous is lost in the feeling that the visions of the poet 
do not transcend in their wildness, the spiritual harmonies of 
which they are the outward manifestation. 

The " Endymion" contains passages which would do honour 
to the Elizabethan poets, with much commonplace which would 
disgrace Blackmore. The address to the moon, in the third 
book,* is conceived in the loftiest, the address to the muse, in the 

* O Moon ! the oldest shades 'mong oldest trees 
Feel palpitations when thou lookest in : 
O Moon ! old boughs lisp forth a holier din 
The while they feel thine airy fellowship. 
Thou dost bless everwhere, with silver lip 
Kissing dead things to life. The sleeping kine, 
Couch'd in thy brightness, dream of fields divine : 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 269 

fourth book, in the worst spirit of poetry. Wherever Keats has 
a picture of voluptuous passion, or of gorgeous scenery to paint, 
there he marvellously succeeds ; wherever he has to produce 
any conception, which requires high moral truth to animate into 
life, there he egregiously fails. It would appear that his theory 
which submerged intellectual into aesthetic truth, exercised some 
deadening influence in unfitting him for that sweep through 
the blue empyrean of thought, by which alone the topmost 
heights of song can be scaled. For, instead of allowing his 
imagination to be moulded and guided by his judgment, his 
judgment takes its bent from the imagination. Fancy is never 
brought to illustrate reason, but reason is unceasingly employed 
upon the operations of fancy. Hence Keats, while perfect 
master of every subject which could be represented through the 
types of sensuous beauty, while he could condense a picture 
into a word, or make a line unfold a world of voluptuous 
thought, cannot advance a step in those regions where the 
ideal is to be sculptured out of the intellect alone, and where 
the imagination cannot invest its forms with the shapes and 
colours of actual creation. Of invention, in the wider sense, 
Keats affords us few if any striking samples. The time had not 
yet come when he could abandon his models and strike out 
new characters for himself. Boccaccio supplied him with the story 

Innumerable mountains rise, and rise, 
Ambitious for the hallowing of thine eyes ; 
And yet thy benediction passeth not 
One obscure hiding-place, one little spot 
Where pleasure may be sent : the nested wren 
Has thy fair face within its tranquil ken, 
And from beneath a sheltering ivy leaf 
Takes glimpses of thee ; thou art a relief 
To the poor patient oyster, where it sleeps 
Within its pearly house ; — the mighty deeps, 
The monstrous sea is thine — the myriad sea ! 
O Moon ! far-spooming ocean bows to thee, 
And Tellus feels her forehead's cumbrous load. 



270 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

of "Isabella ; " andTooke's "Pantheon" with the groundwork of 
" Endymion." In the poem of " Lamia " he did little more than 
amplify Burton. His friend Brown supplied him with the plot and 
characters of the " Tragedy of King Otho." But of invention in 
the narrower sense, as regards the creation of incidents to fill 
up the lacunes of a story or of a character, he evinced no lack of 
power. In pathos also he was deficient. Meek-eyed pity, mother of 
tears, never extended her wand over Keats. His habit of reposing 
on delicious sensations, of making his home in the very heart 
of voluptuous beauty, led him to avoid cultivating the power 
of imparting a sense of foreign wretchedness to others. The 
lofty misery, the silken grief of unsated love yearning for an 
object it could not find, or which but scantily requited its 
passion, is the only cloud which flits across the sunshine of Keat's 
page, and then only dimming its brightness with the shadow 
of beauty always present, and never with the blackness of an 
aching void. For Keats was too much occupied in blending 
the sensuous with the ideal, to make the heart sick over the 
wide chasm existing between the loveliness of its spiritual 
conceptions and their earthly realizations. Keats has been 
connected with Chatterton, as the second youthful prodigy in 
our literature;* nor is the association unfitting. For the 
" Endymion," considering the youth of the writer, is as much 
a marvel as "CElla or the Battle of Hastings." It has as many 
beauties, though these are encumbered with greater blemishes, 
springing, perhaps, from the redundancy of that imaginative 
element in which Keats was undoubtedly superior. But the 
comparison must not blind us to the fact, that Keats lived five 
years longer than his rival, and even then proved deficient in 
invention and pathos in which Chatterton revelled. 

It would be, however, manifestly unfair to test Keats' poetry 

* See Life and Remains by Lord Houghton, whose dispassionate 
criticism, and warm sympathy with the subject of his labours, have raised 
for Keats an enduring literary monument. The "Endymion" was inscribed 
by its author "to the memory of Chatterton." 



ALEXANDRINE POETS. 271 

by the principles we would apply to the productions of a writer 
who had arrived at the maturity of his powers, and in whose 
future there was no promise to fulfil. As well might we expect 
the ripe fruits of harvest in spring, as to find in the productions 
of youth, the mature beauties of later years. In judging of 
Keats, we must not take the crudities which spring from 
theories hastily formed, and which would have been as hastily 
abandoned, to guide our decision. We must take the general 
tone of his poetry, rather than isolated passages, the new 
ground which he broke, rather than what he actually accom- 
plished, as a criterion of his powers. If we regard the spirit of 
originality he evinced, the lofty models he strove to emulate, 
and the voluptuous sense of beauty which reigns through all his 
conceptions, there can be only one opinion, that had he lived 
as long, he would have ranked as high, as any of his contem- 
poraries. In the " Eve of St. Agnes, 5 ' and in his shorter pieces, 
where the subject fell within the scope of his powers, he rises 
almost to the perfection of his art. What picture, for instance, 
in English poetry can surpass his portrait of Madeline ? — 

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, 
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast, 

As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon : 
Rose-bloom fell on her hands together prest, 

And on her silver cross soft amethyst, 
And on her hair a glory, like a saint ; 

She seem'd a 'splendid angel newly drest, 

Save wings for heaven : — Porpyhro grew faint : 
She knelt so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint. 

Anon his heart revives : Her vespers done, 
Of all its wreathed pearls, her hair she frees, 

Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one ; 
Loosens her fragrant boddice, by degrees 

Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees : 
Half hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed, 

Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees, 
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed, 
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled. 



272 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest, 
In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex'd she lay, 

Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress'd 
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away, 

Flown, like a thought, until the morrow day ; 
Blissfully haven'd both from joy and pain ; 

Clasp'd like a missal, where swart Paynims pray ; 
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain, 
As though a rose should shut and be a bud again. k 

His "Odes to Pysche" and the "Nightingale," and the "Lines 
on a Greek Vase," if they have not the classical finish of Collins, 
have as much depth of feeling, and far more luscious sweetness 
than anything Collins ever wrote. Most of his sonnets will not 
suffer from comparison with the best of Wordsworth's. His 
" Address to Fancy" only needed a little more sustained power 
to entitle it to be bound up with the " Allegro " of Milton : — 

Sit thee by the ingle, when 

The sear faggot blazes bright, 

Spirit of a winter's night. 

When the soundless earth is muffled, 

And the caked snow is shuffled 

From the ploughboy's heavy shoon ; 

When the Night doth meet the Moon 

In a dark conspiracy, 

To banish Even from the sky. 

In rich imagination, veryfew poets have equalled Keats. Every 
trait, even the most commonplace feature he produces, derives 
new splendour from being steeped in the gorgeous colours of 
that faculty. He piles his images one upon the other with 
glowing hand, like the nectared sweets Porphyro heaped up for 
his lover, till the dullest objects became impregnated with ideal 
life and beauty, and human nature is elevated to a sphere of 
crystalline grace and purity of which we have but few outward 
manifestations. Where the objective sublime is not interwoven, 

* " The Eve of St. Agnes," sts. 25, 26, 27. 



ALEXANDRINE SCHOOL. 273 

as it frequently is, with the body of his subject, he easily 
attains it with a stroke of his pen, as, 

Scowl on, ye Fates ! until the firmament 
Outblackens Erebus, and the full cavern'd earth 
Crumbles into itself.* 



or, 



or, 



At this with madden 'd stare 
And lifted hands, and trembling lips he stood, 
Like old Deucalion mountain'd o'er the flood, 
Or blind old Orion hungry for the morn; + 



I shall die 
Like a sick eagle gazing on the sky. 

Had the story of Isabella been his own, it would have derived, 
from Keats' manner of telling it, all the characteristics of a high 
class narrative poem, wanting, perhaps, nerve and fire, but still 
tremulous with voluptuous passion and the sad grief which 
springs from the violent extinction of its object. Isabella's 
woes, in the pages of the Italian, have an undying fragrance, but 
the English poet, while preserving all their original freshness, 
has steeped them in colours as ethereal as Homer ever "threw 
round the deities he winged from heaven. All these excel- 
lencies in themselves would have sufficed to place Keats in the 
second rank of his art ; but when we consider the unripe age of 
the writer, and the divine promise which they manifest, it can 
hardly be doubted, had his life been protracted, that he would 
have left few names in that rank above his own. But the great 
merit of Keats is, that he broke away from the established 
schools of poetry in his day,, and followed the impulse of 
his genius in the realization of the beautiful. The antique 
creations of Greece furnished him with the forms, but the 
passionate sentiments with which he animated them, and the 
philosophy of which he made them the exponents, would have 
been as new to the inhabitants of ancient Greece as they were 
to those of modern Europe. Love and beauty, — those twin 

* " Endymion," b. iv., s. 122. + Ibid., b. ii., s. 19S. 

18 



274 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS . 

genii of the ideal world, it was Keats' aim to make the penates 
of each cottage hearth, — to domesticate permanently in every 
nook of perishable creation. In his poetry they became the 
foster guardians of this life, the powers calculated to strike 
selfishness out of man's nature, and restore the balance warped 
by Greek art on the side of sensuousness, and by Christian art 
on the side of dry spirituality, in favour of a union which should 
combine the perfections of both, without the faults of either. 
In Keats' pages the world may satiate its thirst for material 
loveliness, and feel that such loveliness is but the shell or outward 
embodiment of its spiritual purity. In his realm, there is no 
antagonism as in that of Milton, or of Wordsworth. He writes 
like one who had penetrated into the mysteries of the universe, 
who had drawn closer to his embrace the spirit of loveli- 
ness enshrined in creation, and who could throw back the 
curtains of gross material custom, and hard encrusted prejudice, 
to admit his fellows to the shrine of the same divine beauty 
with which he was intoxicated. With Keats, paradise was 
continually breaking through the earth in exuberant blossoms, 
and he would have its breath constitute the atmosphere of 
man's daily life, until its pleasures became not a future un- 
certainty, but a present reality. • But the paradise of Keats was 
not a heaven stripped of material loveliness, and refined into 
spiritual vacuity, or a sensuous harem filled with voluptuous 
forms, but a sphere presided over by spiritual love as well as 
material beauty, in which man might sink the coarser elements 
which degrade and perplex his life, in the harmonious develop- 
ment of his nature, and posterity may wander with delight for 
ever. 



THE ART SCHOOL. 275 



CHAPTER XL 

THE ART SCHOOL. 

THE law of reaction is as visible and constant in the poetic 
as in the moral or political sphere. It not unfrequently 
happens that the change in the- one draws after it a revolution 
in the other. So it has been during the progress of the present 
century. The French revolution, followed by the Napoleonic 
wars, was one of these world-shaking epochs calculated to foster 
poetic genius, and arouse its loftiest energies. The effect was 
manifest in a crowd of writers constituting such an oasis in our 
literature as is not to be met with since the Elizabethan period. 
All that was wild and beautiful, grand or romantic, found 
gifted exponents and appropriate expression. The world was 
startled by the appearance of some six or seven poets, each 
moving in a separate sphere, each dominating their age, each 
striving with Titanic force to impel the national taste into oppo- 
site paths, quite different from any trodden or opened out before. 
But the relapse came. The political ferment of Europe settled 
down into certain abiding channels. The old institutions were 
revived again, with a few of their obsolete gables removed. 
Everything took a stereotyped shape. It appeared as if man's 
fate was fixed by destiny, and his struggles, like those of Ence- 
ladtts, only led to the belching of volcanic fires, without ridding 
him of the incubus that pressed upon his powers. Men grew 



276 EST1MA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

patient of their burdens, and reconciled themselves to the 
situation. They accepted the philosophy of fortitude, as taught 
in the school of resignation, and practised by the disciples of 
despair. They even regarded their miseries in the light of some- 
thing good, as the disciplinary school of the virtues. Passion, 
or the yearning after a lofty sensuous ideal, was rebuked. Any 
notable advance to human perfectibility in this world was treated 
as the dream of Utopists. As the French, after overflooding 
Europe with their republican notions, settled down under the 
petty edifice of constitutional government, so the spirituality 
which, in the last poets, had overnooded the great ocean of 
Greek philosophy, quietly subsided into the four corners of the 
village catechism. The outbranching energies of science, the 
numerous fields of commercial enterprise, the growth of the 
mechanical arts, each contributed to materialize men's minds, 
and to teach them to look to women for the softer influences, 
the etherealizing effects, formerly derived from aesthetic pursuits. 
As in the age of feudal violence, men, after the shocks of mailed 
warfare, leant with renewed trust on women, so after absorption 
in the fierce struggles of iron-handed competition, a similar 
submission is gracefully yielded to their supremacy in matters 
of spiritual interest. The feudal age combined its loftier plea- 
sures with its duties ; an economic age, with its utilities. But 
as man's scale in the aesthetic balance goes down, woman's in- 
variably goes up. Under her influence, music, of the three 
sister-arts, acquired the greatest pre-eminence. Then followed 
—proximo,, sed longo iniervallo — painting. Poetry brought up 
the rear. The consequence is, that poetry began to be valued 
only as a medium of reflecting the features of her two younger 
sisters. Poetic conceptions gained in grace and ease what they 
lost in force and originality. The visions of the bard's brain 
were considered solely from an artistic point of view. Poetry 
became the handmaid of painting, not its master : all views 
inconsistent with cloistered morality or prevailing dogmas 
vanished. The higher drama, founded much more than people 



THE ART SCHOOL. 277 

think upon strong metaphysical conceptions, at once disap- 
peared, and the commonalty, unrestrained by any exercise of 
better judgment on the part of their superiors, went in for 
scenic illusions, for gorgeous upholsteries, for hairbreadth 
escapes, for piratical fires, and sensational denouements. The 
corruption of the novel followed in the wake of dramatic de- 
generacy. Both are manifest signs that the organization of art 
in its higher range is too contracted, its pulsations too weak, to 
strike deep root among the masses of the community. Of that 
organization, these are the three great characteristics : first, the 
mediaeval wail over the necessity of enduring evil as a stepping- 
stone to good ; second, the intrusion of morality into the do- 
main of art; third, subjection to women as the etherealizing 
element. And these three great principles are represented in 
the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. 

In the infancy and growth of a language, poets may achieve 
great distinction by the introduction of new metres, or by 
improving those in being to such an extent as to substitute 
music for dissonance, and beauty of form for clumsiness of ex- 
pression 1. It is for their force of style, for vigour of execution, 
that Chaucer and Dryden are so distinguished, rather than for 
the splendour of their conceptions* But when a language has 
reached the limits of its growth, when its forms are perfected, 
writers are driven back for distinction upon the grandeur of 
their I matter. Hence, all the poets of the nineteenth century 
who Jiave achieved greatness have rested their pretensions upon 
open] ag out some new region of thought, or for introducing us 
to a sphere unexplored before. Scott resuscitated chivalry. 
Wordsworth struck some of the most powerful chords which 
( )ind in one chain of harmony the mind of man with the ex- 
ternal universe. Byron idealized passion until its sensuous traits 
(dazzled the soul with the effulgence of its own spiritual essence. 
'.The mission of Shelley was to substantialize a spiritual philo- 
sophy, by investing it with the embodiments of his own imagi- 
nation. But if the age were asked what new world of thought 



>< -ffc^ > -..- i .■ I ..,,.,,. 



278 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

has Tennyson explored, what path has he discovered in the 
regions of mind untrodden or undreamt of before, there 
would be some difficulty in obtaining an answer. The fact is, 
Tennyson has produced nothing new to startle his contem- 
poraries with. He has not dominated the age, but merely 
given back to it the modicum of spirituality it possesses, beauti- 
fully idealized, it is true, and with a melody and a pathos which 
show he is a genuine poet ; but still, his efforts, on account of 
their circumscribed range, their lack of the bold imaginative 
element, are by no means entitled to rank with those of the 
illustrious group who preceded him. The love-making of refined 
society, the treating woman as a sort of ethereal being, the tone of 
Provencal sentimentality, the philosophic enforcement of Chris- 
tian ethics, the enlivening of early legends with the feelings of 
modern experience, all these he found in the age, and the age 
has seen its features reproduced with such freshness and vigour 
in his page, that, like another Narcissus, it has become infatu- 
ated with its own conceptions. Tennyson has idealized the 
thoughts of his contemporaries, and therefore his contem- 
poraries have come to regard Tennyson as a great poc t. His 
conceptions are colossal, because they are the reflex of their 
own. 

What then is new in Tennyson will be found, not in the raw 
material, but in his manner of dealing with the sentiments he 
has derived from his age. His thoughts are second-hand, his 
treatment only peculiar to himself. Other poets take the re- 
sults of science, and describe things according to appearances. 
Not so Tennyson. He remembers we live in a scientific age, 
and goes into causes with the zeal of a man who views na ure 
from his laboratory, or of a physician who reads in palpabi 
phenomena the secret agents at work in their production. 
The transmission of life from parent to offspring by means of 
the umbilical cord is hardly a subject for poetical treatment. 
But Tennyson has turned the scientific fact to account in a 
line communicative of very deep feeling : — 



THE ART SCHOOL. 279 



Hath still'd the life that beat from thee.* 

Shakespeare tells us that dew falls from heaven. He had not 
the advantage of being acquainted with Well's theory. Tenny- 
son has, and gives us the benefit of it. In describing the dress 
of the Princess, he tells us how it hung :— 

Thicker down the front 
With pearls than the sward with drops of dew, 
When all night long a cloud clings to the hill, 
And with the dawn dispersing, lets the day- 
Strike where it clung. 

Tennyson also cannot describe the same lady without connect- 
ing her with the Copernican theory : — 

All beauty compressed in a female form 
The Princess ; like to the inhabitant 
Of some clear planet close upon the sun, 
Than our man's earth. 

An ordinary poet in describing the coming on of evening 
would confine himself to effects, as in " Parasina : " — 

And in the heavens a darker blue, 
And on the leaf a browner hue. 

But Tennyson very scientifically reminds us of Galileo's doc- 
trine : — 

He fled on, and hill and wood 
Went ever streaming by him, till the gloom 
That follows on the turning of the world 
Darkened the common path ! f 

And again in lines which no reader will weary of repeating : — 

Move eastward, happy Earth, and leave 

Yon orange sunset waning slow, 
From fringes of the faded eve 

O ! happy planet, eastward go. 

* " In Memoriam," vi. f " Pelleas and Etarre." 



28o ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Ah ! bear me with thee, smoothly borne 

Dip forward under starry light, 
And move me to my marriage morn, 

And round again to happy night. 

Occasionally, Galilean physics is made the source of sublime 
comparison : — 

Look up, and let thy nature strike on mine, 
Like yonder morning on the blind half world. * 

And again in the most spirited of his miscellaneous poems : — 
Not in vain the distant beacons. Forward, forward let us range, 
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change ; 
Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day. 
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay, t 

Geologists have shown to what extent the bed of the ocean 
shifts and changes its limits ; and it has also been incontestably 
proved of late years, that the most violent storms only affect 
its surface, while they leave the central body of its waters un- 
touched. Tennyson has embodied these two facts in his " In 
Memoriam," — 

• There rolls the deep where grew the tree ; 
O earth, what changes thou hast seen, 
There, where the city roars, hath been 
The stillness of the central sea.J 

Meteorologists explain to us how the morning breezes arise 
by the cold air contracting, and the warmer being sucked or 
drawn in to fill up the vacuum. The operation is familiar to 
Tennyson, and he has given to its mechanism a poetic ren- 
dering, in a masterly sketch of the dawn : — 

And suck'd from out the distant gloom 

A breeze began to tremble o'er 

The broad leaves of the sycamore, 
And fluctuate all the still perfume. § 

Most poets would describe wine or grapes with relation to 
* " The Princess. " f " Locksley Hall. " % cxxii. § xciv. 



THE ART SCHOOL. 



their effects on the senses of man. But Tennyson goes to the 

root of fermentation : — 

Wines that heaven knows when 
Had sucked the fire of some forgotten sun, 
And kept it through a hundred years of gloom 
Yet glowing in a heart of ruby. * 

Thomson, when he describes a thunderstorm, knew nothing 
about Franklin's discovery, or Robespierre's application of it 
to protect buildings, and therefore merely gives the effect as 
seen by the naked eye. But Tennyson produces the pheno- 
mena with all the effects of modern discovery : — 

The electric cloud 
Flaying the roots and sucking up the drains, 
And shadowing down the champain till it strikes 
On a wood, and takes and breaks, and cracks and splits, 
And twists the grain with such a roar, that earth 
Reels, and the herdsmen cry. f 

In none of these things is there anything original. Other 
great poets deal with physical truths in their imaginative range, 
but Tennyson in their scientific aspects. They anticipate the 
revelations of natural philosophers, bat Tennyson merely follows 
in their wake, and makes poetical capital out of their discoveries. 
In this he shows his sound sense, rather than his imaginative 
power. Every link in the chain of scientific law has its poetical 
side, and one of the peculiar features of Tennyson is to set this 
forth in terse and expressive language. By this means he awakens 
responsive echoes in the breasts of a matter-of-fact age. This is 
certainly merit of a very respectable, but by no means of the 
highest order, in poetry. 

Another peculiarity in Tennyson is the extent to which 
he embodies the principles of art in his works. Grand 
conceptions generally carry the writer out of himself. The 
poet who rules supreme in the lofty sphere of imaginative 
passion, who lives in the region of sublimity, never descends 
* " Golden Supper." t "Princess." 



282 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

to the mechanical elements of drawing.* He leaves the painter 
to toil after him, instead of moving in the wake of the painter. 
But Tennyson applies the rule and the compass to everything 
he takes in hand, simply because his conceptions are not of 
that sort which overpower the mind by their depth or immensity, 
but which depend for their effect on minuteness of detail and 
elaborateness of finish. He unceasingly appeals to the eye, 
as Ruskin occasionally cultivates an ideal acquaintance with 
the spirit. In this respect the poet and the artist are filchers 
upon each other's domain : just as the grocer who in our time 
has invaded the province of the victualler, and the vendor of the 
fiery spirit who en revanche has turned the tables the other way. 
Ruskin has poetized drawing, and Tennyson has imported the 
principles of drawing into poetry. One of these principles is 
that things in looming through darkness or mist seem to swell 
out beyond their natural size, and allowance must consequently 
be made for this in painting. Tennyson seldom loses sight of 
this feature, as in his description of Pelleas leaving the castle 
of Etarre, perhaps, the finest in the idyll : — 

And forth he passed, and mounting on his horse ; 
Stared at her towers that larger than themselves 
In their own darkness, thronged into the moon, 
Then crushed the saddle with his thighs, and clenched 
His hands, and madden'd with himself, and moaned. 

And in the " Passing of Arthur :" — 

But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge, 
Clothed with his breadth, and looking as he walked 
Larger than human life on frozen hills. 



* " I know nothing of painting. Depend upon it, of all the arts it is the 
most artificial and unnatural, and that by which the true sense of mankind 
is most imposed upon. I never yet saw the picture, or the statue, which 
came a league within my conception or expectation, but I have seen many 
mountains, and seas, and rivers, and views, and two or three women who 
went as far beyond it."— Byron's Letters. 



THE ART SCHOOL. 283 

And asrain in " The Princess :" — 

And twilight gloomed, and broader grown the bowers, 
Drew the great night into themselves. 

In the " Requiescat " we get the principles of refraction :- - 

Fair is her cottage in its place, 

Where yon broad water sweetly, slowly glides ; 
It sees itself from thatch to base 

Dream hi the sliding tides. 

And in " The Golden Supper," we get the elements of per- 
spective : — 

Then at the far end of the vault he saw 
His lady with the moonlight on her face, 
Her breast as in a shadow prison, bats 
Of black and bands of silver which the moon 
Struck from an open grating overhead 
High in the wall, and all the rest of her 
Drowned in the gloom and horror of the vault. 

Most poets in their descriptions seize upon salient features, 
and leave the reader's imagination to fill up the rest of the 
canvas. But Tennyson describes his scenes with a minute 
particularity which makes us think he had either a coloured 
picture before him, or drew his sketch on paper, and then pro- 
ceeded to put it into words. Who does not recognize Constable's 
painting of The Ford, with Salisbury Cathedral in the back- 
ground, in the following lines ? — 

A league of grass washed by a slow broad stream, 
That stirred with languid pulses of the oar, 
Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on 
Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge 
Crowned with the minster's towers. 

The picture of the Gardener's daughter is quite equal to any 
water-coloured drawing in speciality : — 

One arm aloft — 
Gowned in pure white, that fitted to the shape, 
Holding the bush, to fix it back, she stood. 



284 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

A single stream of all her soft brown hair 

Pour'd on one side : the shadow of the flowers 

Stole all the golden gloss, and, wavering 

Lovingly lower, trembled on her waist,— 

Ah, happy shade ! — and still went wavering down, 

But, ere it touched a foot, that might have danced, 

The greensward into greener circles, dipt 

And mix'd with shadows of the common ground.* 

Who has not seen in the Dutch pictures at the South 
Kensington Museum the 

Full sea glazed with muffled moonlight swell 
On some dark shore, just seen that it was rich : f 

Or the Burial of the Wounded Soldier after the Battle ? — 

Then, because his wound was deep, 
The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him, 
And bore him to a chapel nigh the field, 
A broken chancel with a broken cross, 
That stood on a dark strait of barren land ; 
On one side lay the ocean, and on one hand 
Lay a great water, and the moon was full. J 

It would be idle to deny the fineness of touch, the exquisite 
finish displayed, in most of these artistic pictures, but it is plain 
that originality cannot be numbered among their merits, as a 
walk through any of our modern galleries would show the 
sources of their inspiration. 

When poets lack substantial materials, they are driven to 
make up for the want of bold and startling conceptions by an 
indiscriminate use of embellishments. To some cause of this 
kind may be attributed that constant use of alliteration and 
employment of mimetic words forcing the sound to follow the 
sense, which in other poets is only occasionally resorted to for 
ornament, but which by Tennyson is woven into the very 
structure of his poetry. His " Palace of Art" and " Dream of 
Fair Women " are full of it. 

'Gardener's Daughter." + " The Princess. " % "Passing of Arthur." 



THE ART SCHOOL. 285 

The golden gorge of dragons spited forth a Hood of fozmtain foam. 

Cloisters 
Echoing all night to that sonorous How of spited fountain flcwds. 

Cleopatra, though bearing in her oval features the traces of 
her Greek descent, is represented as a 

Queen, with swarthy cheeks, and fold $lack eyes, frow found with 
fanning gold. 

His elegiac poetry is strewn with this mannerism "as thickly 
as daisies in April grass : — 

On the bald street freaks the <51ank day. * 

The breaker, freaking on the foach.f 

And east and west, without a breath, 
Mixt their dim /ights, /ike /ife and death, 
To froaden into foundless day. $ 

Here she brought her harp, and flung 
A ballad to the frightening moon. § 

Ere childhood's flaxen ringlet turned 
To $lack and frown on kindred frow.|| 

and elsewhere : — 

The ?;zoan of doves in immemorial elms, 
And ;;zur7«urings of innumerable bees. IT 

The .rea, 

The .silent sapphire .spangled marriage ring of the land.** 

The .shrill edged shriek of a mother divide the 
.shuddering night, ft 

Zive /oyal to the /east wish of the Queen. ++ 

The river sloped 
To plunge in cataract, shattering on <51ack blocks 
A freadth of thunder. § § 

* "In Memoriam," vii. IT " The Princess." 

+ "The Princess." ** "Maud." 

t "In Memoriam," xciv. +f Ibid. 

§ Ibid., lxx. XX "Guinevere." 

|l Ibid., lxxxviii. §§ " The Princess. " 



^p* 



286 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

If to these peculiarities we add a studied reticence, a Saxon 
simplicity combined with a Greek incisiveness of language 
occasionally bordering upon that of the old translation of 
the Bible, and a corresponding gravity of tone, as if the poet 
even in joyful subjects was moving under a deep sense of moral 
responsibility, we shall get all the specialities which distinguish 
the Laureate from his predecessors. These differences do not 
consist in illuminating any new mines of thought with boldness 
of invention, with profuse imagery or sublime flights of ima- 
gination, but in the grave and artistic embellishments, the 
scientific treatment and vocal formalisms with which he has 
embodied the spiritual aspirations of his day. His merit lies 
not so much in the substance, as in the dress of poetry ; not in 
the splendour of his materials, but in their elaborate finish and 
execution. In little things he is great, in great things little. 

The feminine element in Tennyson assumes startling promi- 
nence, as we would naturally expect from a mind more capable 
of remoulding impressions derived from outward objects than 
impressing its own subjectivity upon others. Woman forms the 
topic of three-fourths of his earlier poems. His first volume, 
indeed, hardly consisted of any other subject. The lengthier 
efforts of his muse are nearly all about woman. " Maud," "The 
Princess," and the principal Arthurian idylls, — in all these the 
male characters are mere puppets of a background to bring 
his heroines into prominence. In the " Holy Grail " and 
" Pelleas and Etarre," he has brought out the masculine 
element ; but in proportion as he has done so, his Arthurian 
pictures decline in strength. Now nearly all Tennyson's 
women are of the Belgravian stamp — delicate greenhouse 
exotics rather than genuine products of nature. Though he 
tells us very truthfully that women differ as 

The violet varies from the lily as far 
As oak from elm, 

all the beauties of his pencil seem cast in [the same golden 



THE ART SCHOOL. 287 

mint of artistic creation, with sumptuous heads, imperially 
moulded forms, with throats of carven pearl, and ancles whose 
neatly mortised shape seem better framed for cleaving the air 
than treading on so gross a thing as earth. They are sur- 
rounded with gorgeous upholsteries. They move about in 
pavilioned gardens, in flower-perfumed air, amid glowing sun- 
lights, either reflected from burnished mirrors, or streaming 
through rose-festoons and fluctuating vine branches. They are 
too fairy-like to be real, or too good or wicked to be true. 
Here again the poet's conceptions are " minted" in the " golden 
moods of sovereign artists," embodying the conceptions of con- 
ventionality, but not the genuine features of nature. Every 
civilized age has a tendency with regard to woman ever 
working upwards. As it was of old in imperial Rome, so is it 
now. The age is endeavouring to broaden her culture, to free 
her from the links of feudal prescription, to assign her new 
civil duties and legal rights. This tendency has brought 
woman's mission and functions into greater prominence than 
ever ; and revived the discussions which took place some two 
thousand years ago between Plato and Aristotle with respect 
to her sphere.* Tennyson, as the poetical exponent of his 
age, was bound to give this movement voice; and he has 
accordingly embodied the best feelings of his age with regard 
to woman's influence and sphere in lines which combine rich 
musical cadences with strong common sense, terse antitheses, 
and brilliant poetical imagery : — 

When the man wants weight, the woman takes it up, 
And topples down the scales ; but this is fixed 
As are the roots of earth, and base of all. 
Man for the field, and woman for the hearth : 
Man for the sword, and for the needle, she : 
Man with the head, and woman with the heart ; 
Man to command, and woman to obey, 
All else confusion. + 

* Aristotle, ttoKltlkuv to, au^o/meva |3. t " The Princess." 



288 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



For woman is not undeveloped man, 

But diverse : could we make her as the man, 

Sweet Love were slain, whose dearest bond is this, 

Not like to like, but like in difference ; 

Yet in the long years liker must they grow ; 

The man be more of woman, she of man : 

He gain in sweetness, and in moral height, 

Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world ; 

She mental breadth, nor fail in children care : 

Move as the double-natured poet, each : 

Till at the last she set herself to man 

Like perfect music unto noble words. * 

****** 

Either sex alone 
Is half itself, and in true marriage lies, 
Nor equal nor unequal : each fulfils 
Defect in each, and always thought in thought, 
Purpose in purpose, will in will they grow, 
The single pure and perfect animal, 
The two-celled heart beating with one full stroke, 
Life.t 

But these philosophic views, which are as old as the Stagirite, 
figure in a mock burlesque, while Tennyson's unreal women are 
reserved for his serious poetry. 

The philosophy of Tennyson, instead of dominating the age, 
lags indeed behind it. He cannot get further than honest 
doubt, which he tells us is worth more than half the creeds,! 
though how he can reconcile his praise of scepticism with the 
ban that the Scriptures place upon it, would be difficult to con- 
jecture. When asked for his solution of the enigma of life 
and death, he candidly avows he has no lights to produce 
which philosophy would entertain for a moment : — 

If these brief lays, of sorrow born, 
Were taken to be such as closed 
Grave doubts and answers here proposed, 

Then, these were such as men might scorn. § 

* "The Princess." f Ibid. J " In Memoriam," xlvii. § Ih'd.,xcv. 



THE ART SCHOOL. 289 



They are rather fortuitous guesses, or ill-connected hints, 
which cannot be pursued very far without annihilating each 
other. With him the popular religion still dominates philosophy 
at one end, while leaving it absolutely free at the other. This 
is the off-and-on position of the religious rationalist party, from 
which the present generation derives most of its spiritual cul- 
ture. They stand upon a bridge one buttress of which rests 
upon the positivism of Comte, and the other upon the canons 
of Dort and the Athanasian Creed. I suppose such things are 
matters of necessity rather than choice, for before philosophy 
can be free at both ends, it must begin to disentangle itself 
from one of them. In the process, therefore, the fates of one 
generation at least must be sacrificed at the shrine of incon- 
sistency. Of such a generation Tennyson must be taken as 
the poetical exponent. He combines the doctrine of the Re- 
demption with the progressive theory of the Encyclopaedists.* 
He does not, like Mr. Disraeli, go in for the angels. From 
brute to ape, from ape to man, from man to a higher cycle 
of being, — such are the stages of progress, t All theological 
systems are refractions of the divinity, more or less imperfect, 
none conveying absolute truth, but only such portion as is 
adapted to man's state, and the development of his intellect, — 
a very consolatory belief to those who have wedded their faith 
to any particular school of Christianity. 

Our little systems have their day, 

They have their day, and cease to be ; 

They are but broken lights of Thee, 
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they. 

The human soul, in its ante-natal state, is a part of the spirit 
diffused through the universe. By the act of generation it is 
" drawn from the void and stricken into bounds."! Hence the 
first feeling of a child is that of identification with everything it 

Introductory Poem, and cxvii. t "In Memoriam,'' cxvii. 

% Concluding Poem. 

19 



2go ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

sees. By experience alone it begins to feel itself a separate 
being, caged off, as it were, by the body from the elements of 
which it formed a part* Of the posthumous state of the soul, 
his doctrine is more orthodox. It is not sucked back into the 
spiritual void, but preserves its identity in a higher sphere. t 
Even this view he does not consistently maintain, but glides 
back into the Alexandrine doctrine, that the soul at death is 
absorbed into the ocean of being from which it emanates. % If 
we suppose this ocean of being to be God, we get the Pantheism, 
not of Spinoza, but of Shelley, which Tennyson, in his last 
volume, mingles with the theory of Malebranche :§ 

The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, the plains, 

Are not these, O soul, the vision of Him who reigns ? 

Is not the vision He ? though He be not which He seems. 

Dreams are true while they last, and so do we not live in dreams ? 

Earth, then solid stars, the weight of body and limb, 

Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him ? 

Dark is the world to thee, thyself art the reason why, 

For is He not all but thou that hast power to feel I am ? I 

Glory about thee without thee, and thou fulfillest thy doom, 

Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendour and gloom. - 

It is the jarring dissonance of these various conflicting views, 
pointing, like the maidens in " Etarre," one this way, and the 
other that, the consciousness that his philosophy is nothing less 
than a confused heap of thoughts leaping over each other in 
the dark, which produces in Tennyson that wail in which he 
compares himself to 

An infant crying in the night, 
An infant crying for the light, 

And with no language but a cry. || 

In the " Two Voices" the poet deals with the existence of evil and 
the enigma of life and death purely upon philosophic grounds, 

* xiv. § ' ' The Higher Pantheism. " 

t xlvi., xxxiv. || In " Memoriam, " lii. 

t cxxix. 



THE ART SCHOOL. 291 

but his verses .are little more than an English rendering of 
Goethe's, except that the casual conjectures which the German 
poet thought worthy of being treated only in a spirit of sportive 
banter, the English poet has invested with an air of sepulchral 
solemnity. In a philosophical point of view, we cannot, there- 
fore, look for any guidance, or the least spark of new light, 
from Tennyson. He merely reproduces in melodious verse 
the chaotic and confused notions of his age, which ought to 
have its inconsistencies consigned to oblivion, rather than 
embalmed in an artistic urn for the amazement of posterity. 
The age of Dante was a religious one; that of Lucretius 
sceptical. The current of thought only ran in one direction, 
absorbing in one wide channel all the energies of the soul. 
Such an age has a right to be heard, to make its voice felt through 
its poetical exponent for all time. It also, by imparting con- 
sistent philosophical force to the poet's conceptions, stimulates 
a great mind to soar into the loftiest regions of imagination, 
and sustains him in that elevated sphere, who otherwise, 
wanting a solid basis for his aerial structure, would lack the 
enthusiastic glow of genius required for its construction, as well 
as sufficient groundwork for the support of great artistic 
creations. If we do not seek from the poet an elaborate ex- 
position of philosophical principles, a judicial summing up of 
opposite opinions, he ought at least to be an unexceptionable 
witness, to afford us gleams of light upon the questions at issue; 
but if he, like Tennyson, attempts to combine systems as con- 
flicting as those of Dante and Lucretius, he not only puts him- 
self out of court, but leaves imagination without any ground in 
objective reality. His muse has no substantial nature, or 
intelligible functions, and cannot become the channel of lofty 
inspiration to humanity. 

But if Tennyson in his elegiac poetry, though dealing with 
some of the sublimest subjects that can be grappled with by 
man, affords us no light except to confound our way and make 
our darkness more obscure, he at least scatters over his page 



2Q2 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

many pleasing pictures, evokes much profound feeling, and 
links a world of graceful association with the memory of the 
dead. Perhaps no other elegiac poet in the language strikes 
so many chords in the human heart, by touching those latent 
springs of feeling which bind the various ranks and conditions 
of life into one common brotherhood of humanity. The 
description of the change from light to dusk, and of dusk to 
light, of the physical, as emblematic of the spiritual, dawn;* 
the thirst after the new year as after a new cycle of existence;! 
the identification of others' sorrows with his own, and of both 
with the bleak aspects of nature ; J the challenge by which Fate is 
defied to separate him from a soul blent with the elements of all 
that is good and fair around him ; § the golden reminiscences of 
intellectual feasts and aesthetic pastimes ;|| the seraphic force 
of the intellect which has disappeared, foreshadowing the type 
of the Coming Man ; — all these are rendered, fragmentary it is 
true, and mixed up with much that is commonplace, yet with a 
force which will vitalize them and make them sparkle like gems, 
as long as elegiac poetry occupies a shelf in our literature. But 
to write a poem of sustained pathos, like the " Lycidas" or the 
"Adonais," I do not think Tennyson capable. His grief is always 
called forth by surrounding objects, upon which it leans as a 
crutch, and without which it could not possibly get along, instead 
of welling up of itself, existing apart, and only using external 
images as a gauge of its strength and profundity. In other great 
elegiac poets, the world within overflows the world without. 
In Tennyson, the world without completely dominates the 
world within. We feel nothing of his sorrow except through the 
agency of material phenomena. Let the reader compare the 
lines Burns wrote on the death-day of the Highland Mary, with 
the best of the pieces Tennyson has written on the commemora- 
tion of young Hallam's decease, 51 and he will find the difference 
between artistic pictures imaging sadness in gloom and storm, 

* xciv., lxxxv. + vi., xiii., vii. || lxxxviii. 

t Ixxxii. § cxxix. IT lxxi., xcviii. 



THE ART SCHOOL. 293 



and that pathetic strength which arises out of the mind, dashing 
its own anguish upon the world with the force of a volcanic fire, 
and fusing down the objects which it meets until they become lost 
in the blaze of its own creation. Tennyson's grief, on the other 
hand, even at its height, is often lost among the objects which 
has called it forth, and through which alone it becomes apparent. 
On this account, though always surrounded with artistic effects, 
it is always straggling and intermittent. I cannot, therefore, 
place the " In Memoriam " on the topmost shelf of elegiac 
poetry. Tennyson in this department is far above Shenstone ; 
but he has not reached the sustained loftiness of Gray, the 
impetuosity of Shelley, or the tenderness of Milton. 

It is in the simple bucolic idyll that Tennyson may be said 
to have achieved his early reputation, as affording room for the 
exhibition of those qualities in which he so much excels, viz., 
exquisite pathos, artistic handling of nature, and that tender 
love- sentiment in which he revels, whenever an opportunity 
presents itself. The Queen, some twenty years ago, is reported 
to have taken up an early volume of his poems, containing 
" The Miller's Daughter ; " and was so much struck with 
the homely beauty of the story, that she ordered a copy of the 
book for the Princess Alice. This first led to Tennyson's 
reputation in Court circles, and to the foundation of his sub- 
sequent fame. I think Her Majesty evinced great taste in 
selecting for her admiration a poem which combines the rustic 
simplicity of Bloomfield with the passion of Catullus. " The 
Gardener's Daughter" is a little more artistic, twining the 
sweetest love-memories round scenes so graphically described 
as to place the spots before us with the fidelity of a photograph. 
In " Dora," which belongs to the same group of subjects, the 
pathetic is attempted by the picture of a father who, at first 
flinty-hearted and proud, is finally crushed beneath the weight 
of the domestic affections. In these simple subjects Tennyson 
achieved early success ; and five years ago he carried that 
success to its highest pitch by the production of " Enoch Arden." 



■WPIWPIP 



294 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

The great merit of this poem consists in the severe simplicity of 
the narrative, and the profound pathos the poet succeeds in 
awakening, by the ungarnished recital of the story, without any 
of the meretricious ornaments of his art to support him. There, 
perhaps, never was a poem so perfectly stripped of what are 
usually called " fine passages," and so effective as a whole. This 
arises from a deep knowledge of maternal instincts, and a selec- 
tion of those traits most likely to find their way to the reader's 
heart. But the poet never wanders out of the four corners of 
his narrative. He simply contents himself with idealizing a 
picture of heroic fortitude in a fishing hamlet of the nineteenth 
century. The characters are few, and of the humblest grade 
of life. But, however perfect such pictures may be, they do 
not belong to a high walk of art. Nor, considering the qualities 
employed in their perfect realization, do I consider their pos- 
sessor entitled to claim the same rank with those who have 
evinced a thorough mastery over the representation of society 
in every phase of life, or who strike with masterly hand all the 
sounding chords of passion within the compass of the complex 
narrative poem. 

The nearest approach to anything of this character Tennyson 
has undertaken, is " The Princess ; ;; but the mock heroic mould 
in which the incidents are cast, removes it from the sphere of 
serious poetry. The beauties of " The Princess " are those of a 
descriptive and ornamental character. The defects arise out of 
the framework of the piece, which lacks both unity of colouring 
and design. The poem opens in a vein of solemn banter, but the 
gravity of the writer was too much for him in this field, and he 
falls at once from the heights of burlesque into connubial philo- 
sophy. The first half of the story has a nursery air about it ; 
the last half sounds like a laudatory treatise upon monogamy. 
We cannot for a moment imagine the plot to be real without 
striking the feelings of puberty out of our nature. The scenes 
are so many phantasmagoria, in which the characters dance 
about like elves in a fairy tale, with no relation to actual exist- 



THE ART SCHOOL. 295 

ence. But as the grotesque parts of the poem thicken, they 
become more embedded in splendid ornament : we are abso- 
lutely pelted with gems of every kind. A shower of apt similes, 
of brilliant metaphor, is rained down upon us. Artistic touches 
spring up at every step. It seems a pity that on a story of such 
feeble pretensions to verisimilitude, so much jewellery should 
have been wasted, one-half of which would have made the 
reputation of a far inferior poet. 

The following passage — which refers to the summons of the 
male intruders into the female college, to the presence of the 
Princess, after the discovery of their sex, would do credit to 
Beaumont and Fletcher : — 

They haled us to the Princess, where she sat 

High in the hall : above her droop 'd a lamp, 

And made the single jewel on her brow 

Burn like the mystic fire on a mast-head, 

Prophet of storm : a handmaid on each side 

Bow'd towards her, combing out her long black hair, 

Damp from the river ; close beside her stood 

Eight daughters of the plough, stronger than men, 

Huge women, blowzed with health, and wind, and rain, 

And labour. Each was like a Druid rock ; 

Or like a spire of land that stands apart, 

Cleft from the main, and wail'd about with mews. * 

The scene of confusion which ensues when the feminine 
community hear that they are girt about by a mighty army is 
no less felicitously painted: — 

A tide of fierce 
Invective seemed to wait behind her lips, 
As waits a river level with the dam, 
Ready to burst, and flood the world with foam. 
And so she would have spoken, but there rose 
A hubbub in the court of half the maids 
Gather'd together ; from the illumined hall 
Long lanes of splendour slanted o'er a press 



- 



296 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Of snowy shoulders, thick as herded ewes, 

And rainbow robes, and gems and gem-like eyes, 

And gold and golden heads : they to and fro 

Fluctuated, as flowers in storm, some red, some pale, 

All open-mouthed, all gazing to the light ; 

Some crying there was an army in the land, 

And some, that men were in the very walls, 

And some they cared not ; till a clamour grew, 

As of a new-world Babel, woman-built, 

And worse confounded : high above them stood 

The placid marble muses, looking peace.* 

But the likenesses of the chief actors are rather hit off by 
some apt simile than fully sculptured out before us from the 
rough block of circumstances, as the head of Ida, with 

' ' A single band of gold about her hair, 
Like a Saint's glory up in heaven, "f 

or that of Melissa, 

A rosy blonde, in a village gown, 
****** ^k j^ |-p S a p ar ^ 

And all her thoughts as fair within her eyes, 
As bottom agates seem to wave and float 
In crystal currants of clear morning seas.+ 

The poetry of motion was never combined with higher artistic 
embellishment than in the portrait of Camilla, sketched in. 
another portion of his works : — 

On her head 
A diamond circlet, and from under this 
A veil, that seemed no more than gilded air 
Flying by each fine ear, an eastern gauze, 
With seeds of gold : so_with that grace of hers, 
Slow moving as a wave* against the wind, 
That flings a mist behind it in the sun. § 



t vii. X iv. 

" The Golden Supper." 



THE ART SCHOOL. 297 



As a contrast to this picture may be set that of the Princess : — 

Rising up, 
Robed in the long night of her deep hair, so 
To the open window moved, remaining there 
Fix't like a beacon-tower above the waves 
Of tempest, when the crimson-rolling eye 
Glares ruin, and the wild birds on the light 
Dash themselves dead.* 

The following artistic touch reminds us of Gilbert Forster's 
best water-colour sketches : — 

Many a little hand 
Glanced like a touch of sunshine on the rocks, 
Many a light foot shone like a jewel set 
In the dark crag : and then we turned ; we wound 
About the cliffs, the copses out and in, 

* * * * till the sun 

Grew broader towards his death, and fell, and all 
The rosy heights came out above the lawns. + 

Even feminine sadness cannot be painted without connecting 
it with a landscape like that in Williams' "Storm," which we 
have frequently seen on canvas, but never drawn with such 
colours as Tennyson has put into words : — 

Seldom she spoke, but oft 
Clomb to the roofs, and gazed alone for hours : 
* * ' Void was her look, 

* * * as one that climbs a peak, to gaze 
O'er land and main, and sees a great black cloud 
Drag onward from the deep a wall of night, 
Blot out the scope of sea from verge to shore, 
And suck the blinding splendour from the sand, 
And quenching lake by lake, and tarn by tarn, 
Expunge the world ; so fared she gazing there. + 

But the effects of these artistic beauties are to a great extent 
marred by the absurd story, and by the pale washed-out 
characters with which they are connected. The poet was 

* iv. f hi., adfinem. X vii. 



298 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

evidently only feeling his way. But after being twenty-seven 
years before the world as an author, it must be confessed that, 
compared with what was achieved by his immediate prede- 
cessors in one-half of the time, " The Princess" is not a lofty 
effort. It lacks the embodiment of the struggle between the 
lower and the higher instincts of the soul, which affords the 
widest scope for the imaginative faculty. Artistic strokes are 
substituted for bold flights of sublimity. We are charmed with 
a succession of fairy-like pictures, but never dazed by the 
natural electricity of passion. And even in the regions of 
mock burlesque, if " The Princess " should always hold a con- 
spicuous place, it must not be forgotten that the highest ex- 
cellence in the mock burlesque, which "The Princess" certainly 
has not, can only compete with second-rate excellence in the 
higher walks of poetry. 

About eighteen years after the appearance of " The Princess," 
Europe was shaken by the clash of arms. England, after the 
sleep of h alf a century, put forth her might against Russia ; 
Poland and Hungary were in the travail -throes of a new birth. 
Tennyson had in the interim become Laureate. Here, there- 
fore, was a great opportunity for exercising his powers. Nor 
did he shrink from the ordeal. The result was " Maud," con- 
fessedly one of the weakest of his reflective poems. Of the 
heroine of this piece we are left without any distinct conception. 
The poem, however, embodies the whole love story from the 
winding up to its inception. The poet woos by stealth, as the 
family of Maud contemplate affiancing her to a much richer suitor. 
The secret lovers are, however, surprised by Maud's brother 
and the suitor in question at a trysting gate. A scuffle ensues, 
which is supposed to end in the death of the brother, and the 
flight of his assailant to Breton. The uncertainty of Maud's 
love, at the opening, the scorn with which the poet is treated 
by her family, the fatal termination of the whole business — 
each in turn conspire to produce in the poet's mind that 
disordered state of feeling which is supposed to correspond 



THE ART SCHOOL. 299 

with the disordered condition of Europe. Disquietude abroad, 
disorganization at home, afford a sympathetic field for the pent- 
up indignations which are seething in the poet's breast. But, 
with the exception of an occasional flash of great power, such 
as — 

Like the bountiful season bland, 
When the far-off sail is blown by the breeze of a softer clime, 
. Half lost in the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea, 
The silent sapphire-spangled marriage ring of the land ; — * 



or, 



or, 



And the flying gold of the ruin'd woodlands, drove thro' the air ; — t 



Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar, 
Now to the scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave, 
Walk'd in a wintry wind by a ghastly glimmer, and found 
The shining daffodil dead and Orion low in his grave :+ 

and these of so rare occurrence as to be entirely lost in the 
desert of commonplace by which they are surrounded, the 
whole character of the piece is hardly up to the level of 
Ebenezer Eliot. There is a spasmodic strain through the 
declamatory portions of the poem as if the bard was striving 
to be indignant and could not — just as if he heard in his narrow 
circle at Freshwater, that the times were out of joint, and it 
behoved him, as the perfunctory State poet, to show it. There 
is very little attempt at sketching character, and no scenic 
impersonation. The poem, however, is redeemed by the per- 
fection of its metres, and by one song, which will last as long 
as delicate love sentiment survives in the heart of a generation 
capable of appreciating its expression in glowing language. But 
taking out this song, English literature would lose little by the 
destruction of the rest of the poem. Now, considering the ex- 
perience of the author, the length of time in which his faculties 
had been ripening, and the occasion which called forth this 

* iv. + i., 3. + iii. 



3oo ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

exhibition of his fancy, there is hardly any one who will not 
say that as " The Princess " was only a comparative success, 
" Maud," with the exception of its musical embellishments, was 
an absolute failure. 

Tennyson's mind in his later years has continued to obey 
the impulse first impressed upon it. He has never wandered 
out of the groove of his early productions. Other poets of any 
pretensions to greatness have generally struck out into regions 
undreamt of in their earlier life, emboldened by the expand- 
ing strength of genius. But Tennyson has been remarkably 
steadfast to his first conceptions. The Fatimas, the Claribels, 
the Lillians, the Eleanores, the Madelines, the Orianas of his 
earlier poems, have found sisterly companions in Maud and 
the female characters of " The Princess." The English idylls 
have expanded into " Enoch Arden." The " In Memoriam " 
has its roots in the second volume of " Miscellaneous Poems " 
he presented to the public. The germ of his Arthurian idylls will 
likewise be found among his youthful productions. The heroes 
of the Holy Grail, with Guinevere and Arthur, figure in the 
volume he published nearly thirty years since. Nearly forty 
years ago, Tennyson introduced his readers at Camelot to the 
Lady of Shalott (Elaine) and Sir Lancelot. He has evidently 
been ruminating over the heroes of the Round Table all his 
life. We should, therefore, have been prepared for a fuller em- 
bodiment of the story than he has given to us. From the first 
conception of the characters to the final execution, the space 
embraces two such poetic lives as those of Byron and Shelley. 
The world, therefore, is entitled to expect a great deal from a 
writer whose genius by many is considered to be of an epical 
character. Nor does he seem to have disappointed expectation. 
But the standard by which narrative poetry is gauged appears 
about as low as that by which dramatic poetry is estimated. It 
only remains for Art to set forth her requirements, and show 
how far Tennyson, after a life -long study of his subject, has 
fulfilled or fallen beneath them. 



THE ART SCHOOL. 301 

The feats of Arthur, the character of his Court, and the 
romantic incidents of his reign, come down to us invested with 
the magic drapery which the Crusaders imported from the East. 
To realize the embodiment, however, of the most imaginary 
stories, some attention to time and circumstance is necessary. 
If the account of King Arthur, in its general outline, be legen- 
dary, the myth presents itself to us nailed to a certain frame- 
work of dates, costume, belief, and manners, from which we 
cannot dissever it, without interfering with verisimilitude. But 
Tennyson sets most of these outer envelopes in which the story 
has shaped itself, at defiance. His process, to say the least 
of it, is a very easy one. An ordinary artist would have 
endeavoured to reproduce the Arthurian age. He would have 
bored himself to death about minute details, to preserve the 
representative character of the piece. But Tennyson, with a 
happy indifference to trifles of this character, turns Arthur and 
his knights into sound Protestants, nearly a century before 
St. Austin introduced Papal rule into Great Britain. It is 
universally known that heraldry did not assume the appearance 
of a system till the twelfth or thirteenth century; but six hundred 
years before fields d'or or d' argent were heard of, British knights, 
according to Tennyson, were as punctilious about the quartering 
of their shields as the most fastidious barons of the old German 
empire. Jousts and tournaments are of Norman origin ; but 
Tennyson makes the Knights of the Round Table as familiar 
with them as if they had formed the body-guard of the last of 
the Plantagenets. If the old romances have encrusted the story 
with some of these absurdities, it should have been the duty of 
the poet not to increase them by absurdities still more glaring, 
but to winnow away the chaff, and invest the myth with some 
appearance of reality. 

A poet who produces pictures of legendary life and manners 
without any other shackles than his own fancy imposes on him, 
may by flattering the prejudices of his readers achieve a large 
amount of success ; but when those habits and feelings he has 



302 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

humoured have passed away, it becomes a question how far 
his work will stand the test of an age which does not find its 
ideals reflected there, and which brings to its appraisement other 
weights and measures. Now this is what Tennyson has done, 
and this, in a great measure, accounts for his large success. 
In the " Idylls of the King," he has grafted the moral con- 
ceptions of the age upon the principal characters, and worked 
them out just as if the modern swells of Almack's, with their 
conventional sentiments, were moving about to protect or avenge 
female honour, in the glittering gewgaws of knight-errantry. In 
Arthur we have the faultless perfection of a polished gentle- 
man, whose virtues will not allow him to be jealous of his 
wife, and who, therefore, becomes a cuckold for his pains. 
Pelleas is another ideal character of our time, who, after 
wasting his fortunes upon a thankless woman, and trusting in 
a friend's promise to obtain her favour, is jilted by the one, 
and deceived by the other. Lancelot, who is faithful to an un- 
lawful love, who keeps his vow by cleaving to one only, the age 
can sympathize with, though it cannot greatly admire; for 
Tennyson represents his error as intertwined with many and 
great virtues. Geraint is also a type in whom we recognize* an 
old acquaintance ; for who has not met with the man pre- 
pared to withdraw into rural solitude, to protect the virtue of 
his wife, and who makes his jealousy the torment of his whole 
existence ? Merlin is another victim to female influence of the 
baser sort embodied in the form of angelic beauty. The 
women are, like the men, each cast in the mould of the nine- 
teenth century. Guinevere, the faithless wife, who is caught 
on the sofa with Lancelot, in the usual stereotyped fashion, so 
constantly revealed by our Divorce Court • Enid, the simple- 
hearted pattern of conjugal fidelity, such as mothers are ever 
holding up before their daughters as the beau-ideal of wifedom ; 
Vivien, the dissolute, and Elaine, the spotless, maiden, the one 
living for power and pelf, the other breaking under the incum- 
bent weight of unrequited love, — all these are common types to 



THE ART SCHOOL. 303 

be found round our own hearth, but having little relation to 
an age when woman was considered a chattel, whose rights 
were to be upheld and whose favours purchased by violence. 
All these characters are invested, not only with the instincts, 
the conventional prudery, the ideal sentiments, but the reli- 
gious belief of our day. For when the guilt of Guinevere is 
discovered by the King, he reads her a lecture such as an evan- 
gelical clergyman might be supposed to deliver to his spouse 
caught in a similar predicament. What would be thought 
of an artist who should introduce the polished manners of 
Belgravian society among the lawless knights of Charlemagne, or 
who should describe the savages who brought night upon the 
Roman Empire, doing the honours of the table, and making 
love in the style of the courtiers who lately used to flock to the 
salons of the Champs Elyse'e ? 

The fragmentary treatment of the subject evinces a want of 
power in the artist to handle the story as a whole, and to strike 
out of heterogeneous materials the unity of a great poem. All 
the characters in the ten idylls glance before us like so many 
isolated figures on a wall, having no connection beyond the 
common name of Arthurian idylls. Nor is the want of com- 
pleteness in themselves in any way supplied by reference to a 
common subject. " Pelleas and Etarre " comprise the sixth bead 
on the string, but they are never alluded to before, and each 
coming out of blankness, fade into nothing in the most remark- 
able fashion, Pelleas spitting fire in the dark, and Etarre in her 
wizard castle mourning for a love she constantly rejected while 
under her walls. Merlin and Vivien, Galahad and Percevale, 
Tristram and Isolt, " come like phantoms, so depart." In this 
treatment of his subject, Tennyson has been true to the artistic 
conception which dominates the rest of his works. If the 
reader has ever been admitted into the Queen's robing-room, at 
Westminster, he will have seen the Arthurian story painted in 
panels by Dyce, whose pictures above are elaborately supported 
by exquisite carvings connected with the same subject, in oak 



304 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

panels below. In one design we have Sir Galahad and the 
vision of the holy cup ; in another, the parting of Arthur and 
Guinevere; here we behold Geraint on his foraging quest 
with Enid ; there we are struck with Merlin's adventure with 
Vivian, or by Elaine's futile passion for Lancelot. In the same 
manner Tennyson has panelled his subject. He has treated 
the story from an artistic point of view, selecting detached 
groups for his -pen, just as if he was working in the interest of 
the carver or the artist, and shackled by the narrow framework 
of time and place, instead of soaring with untired wing into the 
sphere of boundless creation. It is said that in thus tearing up 
into fragments tales which ought to have constituted episodes 
converging into one grand trunk of human action, Tennyson has 
consulted the taste of his contemporaries, who would as soon 
think of sitting down to an ox, as attacking a whole epic. But 
surely the popularity of Browning's " Ring and the Book " has 
dispelled the illusion. To my mind, the epic would have been 
more readable, and the characters would have gained in force by 
being weaved into a web of mutual dependence. The tales would 
have increased in interest, flashing light upon each other, while 
mingling their currents in the tide which bore the purpose of 
the writer on to its fulfilment. As the tales at present stand, 
they are like so many isolated compartments, dark and mys- 
terious in themselves, but which, had they formed the part of a 
common ground plan, would have derived splendour and 
symmetry from each other, as they sprang up into the grace 
and unity of a whole. But to accomplish so much needed the 
talents of a great intellectual builder, the mighty force which 
links to his wheels a series of gigantic characters as agents in 
a grand design ; and of these qualities Tennyson has yet given 
no evidence. With some presentiment of his weakness, he 
selected only such portions of the Arthurian story as enabled 
him to indulge his talent for the picturesque, and to avoid the 
great test of success in narrative poetry, — that is, the fidelity of 
his representations to actual life and manners. The types of 



THE ART SCHOOL. 305 



ideal excellence he embodies, are in connection with freaks of 
fancy, not with the great law of human probability. The main 
trunk of the story being kept out of view, Tennyson not only 
chose those topics most adapted for the exhibition of his 
powers, but in the elaboration of which he was most unfettered 
by the lofty requirements of art. A fragmentary treatment was 
thus forced upon him. With the exception of Guinevere, none 
of the idylls develop any action which bears the slightest tinge 
of probability, or which for a moment we can believe to be 
true. As each has an isolated interest, so each imparts an 
independent lesson. Tales of fairy land, generally served up 
in the nursery, steeped in the hues of divine poetry, are each 
made to reflect the instincts and embody the experience of the 
nineteenth century. The intellectual banquet generally pro- 
vided for children, is served before us in the cups and ewers of 
the gods. 

The story of "Enid" reminds one very much of those we read 
in our infantine days, in which the hero is a knight who sets 
out to redress wrong, and just arrives in time to rescue some 
maiden from distress whom he ultimately marries, and with 
whom he is happy for the rest of his life. The only difference 
is that the sequel of the story about overthrowing robbers and 
taking their horses ought to have been placed in the fore part of 
the story, and the lady, in the Castle of Doorm, to have made 
the story perfectly unique with those of our childhood. The 
poet has done, perhaps, as much as could be effected to render 
the characters lifelike, where there was room for natural draw- 
ing and artistic embellishment. His description of Geraint 
has always struck us as a masterpiece in this way : — 

The new sun 
Beat thro' the blindless casement of the room, 
And heated the strong warrior in his dreams ; 
Who, moving, cast the coverlet aside, 
And bared the knotted column of his throat, 
The massive square of his heroic breast, 

20 



306 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

And arms on which the standing muscle sloped, 
As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, 
Running too vehemently to break upon it. 
And Enid woke, and sat besides the couch, 
Admiring him, and thought within herself, 
"Was ever man so grandly made as he?" 

The simple tenderness of Enid, more confiding as it is sorely 
tried, the Hall of Uniol smiling in its decay, Geraint's intro- 
duction therein, and the banquet at Doorm's Castle, are given 
with the exquisite touches of painting on enamel. But when a 
sick man fainting from loss of blood cuts off at a stroke the head 
of a strong earl, and scatters his crowd of retainers with a single 
wave of the arm, we are strongly reminded of the Munchausen 
business. Now, no amount of descriptive talent can naturalize 
extravagant incidents ; and plots which violate nature, however 
artistically embellished, cannot please for any length of 
time. 

The story of " Elaine ; ' in the old romances, no matter however 
unskilfully told, has romance enough in it to interest the most 
prosaic reader. Tennyson has only varied the incidents, and 
beyond the skilful development of the story, has not had re- 
course to much artistic embellishment. In this he has shown 
his sense ; for all stories dealing simply with the affections, if 
complexly treated, require a hand of first-class power. When 
the artist has control over the chords of passion only in their 
simpler keys, the story would lose by any display of pre- 
tentiousness. Tennyson has narrated the story in a simple 
manner, relying as usual upon artistic grouping of incidents and 
character, rather than upon any lofty exhibition of passion. 
Had Byron or Pope selected such improbable subjects for their 
muse, what both would have made of them may be judged from 
the Eloisa of the one, and the Haide'e or Medora of the other. 
But the loftiest exhibition of passion we get from Tennyson, in 
this story, where two women flung away, the one her life, and 
the other her honour, for the same man, is the behaviour of 



THE ART SCHOOL. 307 

Guinevere when her lord expressed a wish that Lancelot may 
wed her rival : — 

"Yea, lord," she said, 
" Your hopes are mine," and saying that she choked, 
And sharply turn'd about to hide her face, 
Moved to her chamber, and there flung herself 
Down on the great King's couch, and writhed upon it, 
And clench'd her fingers till they bit the palm, 
And shriek'd out " Traitor !" to the unhearing wall. 
Then flashed into wild tears, and rose again, 
And moved about her palace, proud and pale.* 

And a second time, when the whisper is going round the 
royal table, of Lancelot's new love, — 

The Queen, who sat 
With lips severely placid, felt the knot 
Climb in her throat, and with her feet unseen 
Crush'd the wild passion out against the floor 
Beneath the banquet, where the meats became 
As wormwood. + 

The love avowal of Elaine to Lancelot is still more simply 
expressed by a wish on her part to be his wife, and if she 
cannot be that, to follow [him through the world in any other 
capacity, when Lancelot sweetens his refusal by the offer of 
one-half of his fortune, in case she marries a poor knight : — 

She neither blush'd nor shook, but deathly pale 
Stood grasping what was nearest, then replied, 
" Of all this will I nothing ;" and so fell, 
And thus they bore her swooning to her tower. + 

All this is effective in its way; but the effect arises from the 
original conception of Elaine's passion in the old romancers, 
and not from the artist's treatment, which simply does no more 
than hold up a glass to their images and reflect the outlines of 
their picture. How different is Byron's representation of one 
of his heroines in an analogous situation : — 

* "Elaine." \ Ibid. X Ibid. 



308 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Nor once did those sweet eyelids close, 

Or shade the glance o'er which they rose, 

But round their orbs of deepest blue 

The circling white dilated grew — 

And there with glassy gaze she stood 

As ice were in her curdled blood ; 

But every now and then a tear, 
So large and slowly gather 'd, slid 
From the long dark fringe of that fair lid, 

It was a thing to see, not hear ! 

And those who saw, it did surprise, 

Such drops could fall from human eyes. 

To speak she thought — the imperfect note 

Was choked within her swelling throat, 

Yet seem'd in that low hollow groan 

Her whole heart gushing in the tone. 

It ceased — again she thought to speak, 

Then burst her voice in one long shriek, 

And to the earth she fell like stone, 

Or statue from its base o'erthrown. * 

The jealousy of Guinevere is painted as the petulance of a 
child, but that of Gulbeyaz as the passion of a sensuous woman : 

When he was gone, there was a sudden change : 
I know not what might be the lady's thought ; 

But o'er her bright brow flash'd a tumult strange, 
And into her clear cheek the blood was brought, 

Blood-red as sunset summer clouds which range 
The verge of heaven ; * * * * 

And the deep passions flashing through her form, 

Made her a beautiful embodied storm, t 

In " Vivien" and " Guinevere " we have most sustained bursts 
of passion, the one in a farewell which may last as long as the 
language ; the other along the whole line of passes which take 
place between an old artificer and a wily woman who tries to 
subject him to her power. The meeting of Sir Tristram and 
Queen Isolt afforded the poet another outlet for his powers, 

* " Parasina," xiv. 

t "Don Juan," Canto v., verses cviii. and cxxxv. 



THE ART SCHOOL. 309 

and in the opening, as well as in some momentary flashes of 
passion during the interview, he is partly equal to the oc- 
casion ; — 

Down in a casement sat, 
A low sea-sunset glorying round her hair 
And glossy throated grace, Isolt the Queen, 
And when she heard the feet of Tristram grind 
The spiring-stone that scaled about her tower, 
Flush'd, started, met him at the doors, and then 
Belted his body with her white embrace. 

But after the lovers had made up their quarrel, and Isolt had 
appeased her jealousy, just in the very crisis of the lava out- 
burst of passion, we were hardly prepared for the following 

bathos : — 

So then, when both were brought to full accord, 

She rose, and set before him all he will'd ; 

And after these had comforted the blood 

With meats and wines, and satiated their hearts — 

Now talking of their woodland paradise, 

The deer, the dew, the fern, the forests, the lawns ; 

Now mocking at the much ungainliness, 

And craven shifts, and long crane legs of Mark. * * * 

The love scenes between Lancelot and Guinevere are none of 
them brought out in their fulness, but rather hinted at than 
described. In the last Tournament, the poet had a splendid 
opportunity of alluding to them; for the elopement is supposed 
to take place during the action of the poem. But all the 
glimpse we get of Guinevere is in a very tame picture, most 
unnatural as applied to a woman whose heart is seized with a 
guilty passion for another, and who is viewing her husband depart 
for the last time, while that passion is uppermost^ in her breast : 

In her high bower the Queen, 
Working a tapestry, lifted up her head, 
Watch'd her lord pass, and knew not that she sigh'd. 
Then ran across her memory the strange rhyme 
Of bygone Merlin, " Where is he who knows? 
From the great deep to the great deep he goes ! " 



3io ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

a question which may be very fairly asked as to Arthur's 
locality in the poem. Even the last night in which they 
met is hurried over in two or three lines, and the whole 
force of the idyll is thrown into the interview between Guine- 
vere and the King. What ought to have constituted the body 
of the idyll, is only made introductory to the end of it. Now, 
splendid as that finish is, it loses somewhat of its force from the 
want of breadth of treatment in the scenes which lead up to 
it. The old romancers only send Guinevere to a convent after 
the death of Arthur in the fight against Modred, in which they 
are both slain. This is, unnatural enough, for it implies that 
Guinevere only relished her passion for Lancelot so long as it 
was guilty. But Tennyson, more unnaturally, makes the pair 
separate immediately upon an event which could have had no 
other consequence except to glue them more closely together ; 
for the set purpose of delivering a homily at the finish, and 
elaborating a farewell picture of great excellence, though the 
leading embellishments be taken from sources so diverse as 
Saint Luke and Homer : — 

Then, listening till those armed steps were gone, 
Rose the pale Queen, and in her anguish found 
The casement : " Perad venture," so she thought, 
" If I might see his face, and not be seen." 
And lo, he sat on horseback at the do'or ! 
And near him the sad nuns with each a light 
Stood, and he gave them charge about the Queen, 
To guard and foster her for evermore. 
And while he spake to these his helm was lower'd, 
To which for crest the golden dragon clung 
Of Britain ; so she did not see the face, 
Which then was as an angel's,* but she saw, 
Wet with the mists and smitten by the lights, 
The dragon of the great pendragonship 
Blaze, making all the night a steam of fire. 
And even then he turn'd ; and more and more 

* "The Acts," c. vi., v. 15. 



THE ART SCHOOL. 311 



The moony vapour rolling round the King, 
Who seem'd the phantom of a giant in it, 
Enwound him fold by fold, and made him gray 
And grayer, till himself became as mist 
Before her, moving ghostlike to his doom. 

Somewhat in the same fashion, Homer represents Achilles on 
the point of setting forth to the ramparts, as the two armies are 
contending over the dead body of Patroclus : — 

But up Achilles rose, beloved of heaven ; 

And Pallas- on his mighty shoulders cast 

The shield of Jove ; and round about his head 

She put the glory of a golden mist, 

From which there burnt a fiery flaming light ; 

And as when smoke moves heavenwards from a town, 

In some far island by fierce foes beset, 

Who all day long with dreadful clangour crowd 

From their own town, soon as the sun was set, 

Thick muffled fires along the turrets gleam, 

Which rushing upward wide illumine the sky, 

And let the neighbours know who may perhaps 

Bring help across the sea ; so from the head 

Of great Achilles light inflamed the air I * 

Hence this farewell stands out, as it were, the fragment of a 
fragment. The natural incidents of the idyll are sacrificed to 

* Homer, Book xviii., Is. 203 — 14. See also Diomede, Book v., 1. 4- 

Avrdp 'AyiWetis &pro Au'0i\os' dpicpl d'Adrjvq 
"Si/mots L<pdifioi<n /3d\' aiyida dvaavoecrcrav, 
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Oi' re Travrjp.epiot. crrvyepip KpcvovTai'Aprjt 
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Tlyverai dtcrcrovaa, -KepiKTioveaai Idecrdai, 
Ei Kev 7TWS airu vrjvcriv dpijs dXKTijpes ftcwprcu' 
'£2s a7r' 'Ax'XX^os /ce0a\?5s creXas aidip' 'Uavev. 



312 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

bring it about that we may get a glimpse of the hero of the 
story, who otherwise threatened to escape us altogether. Thus 
when Arthur is summoned into action, it is not to scare his 
enemies, but to rate his wife ; and we view him, not like other 
heroes, engaged amid the glitter of spears, and the clangour of 
arms on the battle-field, but delivering an evangelical discourse 
preparatory to disappearing amidst a blaze of Roman candles, 
and the wailing of nuns, in the chequered gloom of the night. 

In "Vivien " there is more sustained power than in any of the 
idylls. But " Vivien " even as an episode would be incomplete, 
as it simply is confined to a love parley between two individuals 
who come we know not whence, and go we know not where. 
The necromantic art is largely introduced into the piece, which 
as it stands isolated and unconnected with any phase of real 
life, assumes an appearance of unreality, notwithstanding the 
vivid imagery and the exquisite colouring which pervade every 
line of it. The scenery of the piece streams with crystalline 
light, not coming out of the sober heavens of our sphere, but 
tinged with the magic hues of a fairy world. He does not, 
however, when dealing with the marvellous, powerfully impress 
us with the reality either of his characters or his incidents, 
and occasionally he reminds us of the creations of others who 
do. The following is a cross between Shakespeare's Apothe- 
cary and the wizard Michael Scott with his magical book : — 

A little glassy-headed, hairless man, 
Who lived alone in a great wild on grass, 
Read but one book, and ever reading grew 
So grated down and filed away with thought, 
So lean, his eyes were monstrous ; while the skin 
Clung but to crate and basket, ribs and spine. 
And since he kept his mind on one sole aim, 
Nor ever touch'd fierce wine, nor tasted flesh, 
Nor own'd a sensual wish, to him the wall 
That sunders ghosts and shadow-casting men 
Became a crystal, and he saw them thro' it, 
And heard their voices talk behind the wall, 



THE ART SCHOOL. 313 

And learnt their elemental secrets, powers 

And forces ; often o'er the sun's bright eye 

Drew the vast eyelid of an inky cloud, 

And lash'd it at the base with slanting storm ; 

Or in the noon of mist and driving rain, 

When the lake whiten'd, and the pine-wood roar'd, 

And the cairn'd mountain was a shadow, sunn'd 

The world to peace again : here was the man. 

And so by force they dragg'd him to the King. 

And then he taught the King to charm the Queen 

In such- wise that no man could see her more, 

Nor saw she save the King, who wrought the charm, 

Coming and going, and she lay as dead, 

And lost all use of life ; but when the King 

Made proffer of the league of golden mines, 

The province with a hundred miles of coast, 

The palace and the princess, that old man 

Went back to his old wild, and lived on grass, 

And vanish'd, and his book came down to me. 

Here, as in a fairy tale, we naturally expect, on turning over 
the page, an illuminated picture such as makes the design of 
the narrator palpable to youthful imaginations. But in the 
analogous creations of Scott, we hold our breath suspended 
while we read, and see the actors as palpably as if we had 
been an eye-witness of the scene : — 

' ' I swore to bury his mighty book, 
That never mortal might therein look ; 
****** 

" It was a night of woe and dread, 

When Michael in the tomb I laid ; 

Strange sounds along the chancel pass'd, 

The banners waved without a blast. " 

— Still spoke the monk when the bell tolled one : — 

" I tell you that a braver man 

Than William of Deloraine, good at need, 

Against a foe ne'er spurr'd a steed ; 

Yet somewhat was he chill'd with dread, 

And his hair did bristle upon his head." 



3H ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Slow moved the monk to the broad flag-stone, 

Which the bloody cross was traced upon : 

He pointed to a secret nook ; 

An iron bar the warrior took ; 

And the monk made a sign with his wither'd hand, 

The grave's huge portal to expand. 

With beating heart to the task he went, 

His sinewy frame o'er the grave-stone bent ; 

With bar of iron heaved amain, 

Till the toil-drops fell from his brows, like rain. 

It was by dint of passing strength, 

That he moved the massy stone at length. 

I would you had been there, to see 
How the light broke forth so gloriously, 
Stream'd upward to the chancel roof ; 
***** 

It shone like Heaven's own blessed light, 

And issuing from the tomb, 
Show'd the monk's cowl, and visage pale, 
Danced on the dark-brow'd warrior's mail, 

And kissed his waving plume. 

Before their eyes the wizard lay, 

As if he had not been dead a day. 

His hoary beard in silver roll'd, 

He seemed some seventy winters old ; 

A palmer's amice wrapp'd him round, 

With a wrought Spanish baldric bound, 

Like a pilgrim from beyond the sea : 
His left hand held his book of might ; 
A silver cross was in his right ; 

The lamp was placed beside his knee. 
High and majestic was his look, 
At which the fellest fiends had shook ; 
***** 

And when the priest his death-prayer had pray'd, 

Thus unto Deloraine he said : — 

" Now speed thee what thou hast to do, 

Or, warrior, we may dearly rue ; 

For those, thou may'st not look upon, 

Are gathering fast round the yawning stone ! " 



THE ART SCHOOL. 315 

Then Deloraine, in terror, took 

From the cold hand the mighty book, 

With iron clasp'd, and with iron bound : 

He thought, as he took it, the dead man frown'd ; 

But the glare of the sepulchral light, 

Perchance, had dazzled the warrior's sight. 

When the huge stone sunk o'er the tomb, 

The night return'd in double gloom ; 

For the moon had gone down, and the stars were few ; 

And, as the knight and priest withdrew, 

With wavering steps and dizzy brain, 

They hardly might the postern gain. 

'Tis said, as through the aisles they pass'd, 

They heard strange noises on the blast ; 

And through the cloister-galleries small, 

Which at mid-height thread the chancel wall, 

Loud sobs, and laughter louder, ran, 

And voices unlike the voice of man ; 

As if the fiends kept holiday ; 



I cannot tell how the truth may be ; 
I say the tale as 'twas said to me. * 

But breadth of conception in Tennyson seems almost incom- 
patible with perfect elaboration of finish, and everything in 
"Vivien" is sacrificed to bring out the feminine element in undue 
prominence. In comparison with Vivien, who alone is sculp- 
tured to the life, Merlin seems more or less of a puppet used 
simply to afford occasions for the display of her petulancy. 
He does not exhibit one spark of the doating passion which 
old men usually evince in similar situations, but remains 
throughout a mere talking machine, and is overborne at last, 
not by the fascinations of the charmer, but by her persistency. 
But no one can gainsay the truthfulness of Vivien's bursts of 
passionate sentiment. Though used as means to gain a fiery 
charm, they have all the force of flesh-and-blood creation : — 

* "Lay of the Last Minstrel," Canto ii., verses 15, 22. 



3 1 6 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



Merlin spoke in words part heard, in whispers part, 
Half-suffocated in the hoary fell 
And many- winter 'd fleece of throat and chin. 
But Vivien, gathering somewhat of. his mood, 
And hearing " harlot " muttered twice or thrice, 
Leapt from her session on his lap, and stood 
Stiff as a viper frozen ; loathsome sight ! 
How from the rosy lips of life and love, 
Flash'd the bare-grinning skeleton of death ! 
White was her cheek ; sharp breaths of anger puff 'd 
Her fiery nostril out ; her hand half-clench'd 
Went faltering sideways downward to her belt, 
And feeling ; had she found a dagger there, 
(For in a wink the false love turns to hate,) 
She would have stabb'd him ; but she found it not : 
His eye. was calm, and suddenly she took 
To bitter weeping, like a beaten child, 
A long, long weeping, not consolable. 
Then her false voice made way, broken with sobs : 
" O crueller than was ever told in tale, 
Or sung in song ! O vainly lavished love ! " 
***** 

She mused a little, and then clapt her hands 
Together with a wailing shriek, and said : 
' ' Stabb'd thro' the heart's affections to the heart ! 
Seeth'd like the kid in its own mother's milk ! 
Killed with a word worse than a life of blows ! 
I thought that he was gentle, being great : 

God, that I had loved a smaller man ! 

1 should have found in him a greater heart. 

***** 
Farewell ! think kindly of me, for I fear 
My fate or fault, omitting gayer youth 
For one so old, must be to love you still. 
But ere I leave you, let me swear once more 
That if I schemed against your peace in this,* 
May yon just heaven that darkens o'er me, send 
One flash, that, missing all things else, may make 
My scheming brain a cinder if I lie. " 



* Desiring the charm. 



THE ART SCHOOL. 317 

Scarce had she ceased, when out of heaven a bolt 

(For now the storm was close above them) struck, 

Furrowing a giant oak, and javelining 

With darted spikes and splinters of the- wood 

The dark earth round. He raised his eyes, and sa w 

The tree that shone white-listed thro' the gloom. 

But Vivien, fearing Heaven had heard her oath, 

And dazzled by the livid-flickering fork, 

And deafen'd with the stammering cracks and claps 

That followed, flying back, and crying out, 

" O, Merlin, tho' you do not love me, save, 

Yet save me ! " clung to him and hugg'd him close, 

And call'd him dear protector in her fright, 

Nor yet forgot her practice in her fright, 

But wrought upon his mood and hugg'd him close. 

The pale blood of the wizard at her touch 

Took gayer colours, like an opal warm'd. 

She blamed herself for telling hearsay tales ; 

She shook from fear, and for her fault she wept 

Of petulancy ; she call'd him lord and liege, 

Her seer, her bard, her silver star of eve, 

Her God, her Merlin, the one passionate love 

Of her whole life ; and ever overhead 

Bellow'd the tempest, and the rotten branch 

Snapt in the rushing of the river rain 

Above them ; and in change of glare and gloom 

Her eyes and neck glittering went and came ; 

Till now the storm, its burst of passion spent, 

Moaning and calling out of other lands, 

Had left the ravaged woodland yet once more 

To peace ; and what should not have been, had been. 

For Merlin, overtalk'd and overworn, 

Had yielded, told her all the charm, and slept. 

Had " Vivien " been extended into an episode, or mortised 
into a larger poem executed in a similar spirit, dealing with 
human action in its broader outline, and not with the feminine 
phase of a portion of it, Tennyson might have had his claim 
allowed to a place in the highest niche of narrative poets ; but 
with fragmentary treatment of unreal subjects, having no refer- 
ence to actual life, except as veiled in the cloud of symbolical 



318 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

meaning, and even then only embodying the love phases of 
existence among a conventional class, he appears in the posi- 
tion of a sculptor who can throw off an arm or a leg with 
graceful finish, but who lacks the Promethean touch of making 
the block of marble start up with the organic semblance of 
living reality. 

This fragmentary treatment is still more exemplified in 
"Pelleas and Etarre " and "The Holy Grail," which are the most 
wizard-like stories of the series, and exhibit more unequal 
treatment than any of their predecessors, to which they are 
manifestly inferior. In both there are occasional bursts of 
description, but they come and go like patches of sunlight upon 
the iron grey of clouds, speaking more of the veriest regions 
of mist and shadow than of the solid framework of our rock- 
bound earth. Pelleas, an ingenuous youth just knighted by 
Arthur, on his way to a tournament (in the sixth century) falls 
asleep in a wood, when 

Suddenly waken'd with a sound of talk 

And laughter at the limit of the wood, 

And glancing thro' the hoary boles, he saw, 

Strange as to some old prophet might have seemed, 

A vision hovering on a sea of fire, 

Damsels in divers colours like the cloud 

Of sunset and sunrise, and all of them 

On horses, and the horses richly trapt 

Breast high, in that bright line of bracken stood : 

And all the damsels talk'd confusedly, 

And one was pointing this way, and one that, 

Because the way was lost. 

The principal damsel of this group is Etarre, whose bloom 
bears those crystalline tints common to the rest of the 
picture : — 

For large her violet eyes look'd, and her bloom 
A rosy dawn kindled in stainless heavens ; 
And round her limbs, mature in womanhood, 
And slender was her hand, and small her shape, 



THE ART SCHOOL. 319 

And but for those large eyes, the haunts of scorn, 

She might have seem'd a toy to trifle with, 

And pass and care no more. But while he gazed, 

The beauty of her flesh abash'd the boy, 

As tho' it were the beauty of her soul : 

For as the base man, judging of the good, 

Puts his own baseness in him by default 

Of will and nature, so did Pelleas lend 

All the young beauty of his soul to hers, 

Believing her. 

Of course, Pelleas continues fascinated with his new com- 
panion, and wins for her the prize of the tournament, but on 
returning home finds the castle doors of the lady by her express 
instructions slammed in his face. Etarre has attained her 
object in securing the prize, and despatches her knights to make 
short work of Pelleas, who, still hankering after her favours, 
lingers outside the walls. But the muscles and thews of 
Pelleas are tremendous, and the knights return sorely bela- 
boured and contused, though bearing Pelleas back with them 
pinioned, as he consents to be made prisoner on condition of 
being allowed once more to look upon Etarre. But Etarre is 
still inexorable, and Pelleas is again ejected, to bemoan his 
fate outside the walls. A bevy of knights are now charged by 
Etarre to set on Pelleas all at once, who are just on the point 
of despatching him, when Sir Gawain interferes, drives his 
assailants off, and takes upon himself to plead the cause of 
the injured lover with the flint-hearted Etarre. The sequel 
may be guessed. Instead of pleading his friend's claims, Sir 
Gawain urges his own, and achieves a conquest. Pelleas, after 
lingering round the walls during a couple of nights, on the third 
finds the drawbridge down, and, very unknightlike, sneaks into 
the castle gardens by stealth, and beholds the guilty couple 
asleep, surrounded by a slumbering group of knights and ladies. 
Here there was opportunity for fine description, but Tennyson 
does not put forth his powers. The most we get, in this way, 
is the picture of Pelleas's entrance into the pavilion, which, 



320 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

though evidently intended to be one of the pet passages of the 
poem, is beneath what Southey has achieved in introducing 
Thalaba to the gardens of Aloadin : — * 

Wide open were the gates, 
And no watch kept ; and in thro' these he past, 
And heard but his own steps, and his own heart 
Beating, for nothing moved but his own self, 
And his own shadow. Then he crosst the court, 
And saw the postern portal also wide 
Yawning ; and up a slope of garden, all 
Of roses white and red, and wild ones mixt, 
And overgrowing them, went on, and found, 
Here too, all hush'd below the yellow moon, 
Save that one rivulet from a tiny cave 
Came lightening downward, and so split itself 
Among the roses, and was lost again. 

The upshot of the whole is that Pelleas leaves his naked 
sword across the throats of the treacherous pair, and flies from 
the scene distracted to encounter Lancelot, and by this slender 
thread does he claim admission to rank as an Arthurian hero. 
The moral is palpable enough. As Vivien represents the doating 
folly of old men wasting their substance on wily harlots, Etarre 
reproduces the same lesson for the young. The story is quite 
of a piece with the rest of the series. It is carved out of cloud 
land, having no substantial basis in religion or philosophy. The 
characters, visionary-like, arise out of nothing, and fade into 
nothing. Their actions outrage all that we know of common 
life and manners, in order to impart a lesson which we each 
derive from experience, and which each is little better for 
knowing. 

The quest for the sacred blood (Holy Grail) is one of those 
stories combining Persian magic with monkish tradition, so com- 
mon to the middle ages. The grotesqueness of the legend has not 
deterred Tennyson from treating it in a serious spirit, by making 
the quest of the knights for the sacred cup as emblematic of that 
* " Thalaba," Book vi. 



THE ART SCHOOL. $H 

God-seeking which ought to form the pursuit of every Christian 
soul. The Persian element of the story is brought out graphic- 
ally enough. But the vague and indistinct fashion in which he 
has worked out the Christian aspect of the subject, the wild 
series of incoherent visions ending in nothing, must prove a 
stumbling-block to the ordinary reader. That some knights by 
indolence, others by a pretty face, should be turned aside from 
their task, and that each should succeed in the pursuit in pro- 
portion to the godlike qualities within him, is natural enough. 
But to realize this with any force it was hardly necessary to 
make Sir Galahad disappear altogether phantom-like in a cloud, 
and Sir Perceval get so far after him, that we hardly see any- 
thing of him but his feet. The vision of Sir Perceval, doubt- 
less intended to be the finest portion of the poem, is, to my 
mind, the worst. It affects the most, and accomplishes the 
least. The images are incoherent. The poet has no distinct con- 
ception of his subject, and, therefore, fails to convey any notion 
of it to his readers. A heap of arches, bridging over gulfs and 
branching into cloud-land, are huddled together without any 
definite design beyond forming a sort of gutted pathway to a 
city of pearl, presumed to be for the habitation of the saints. 
About the worst device of "Paradise Lost" is the bridge from 
earth to hell,* of which Milton makes Sin and Death the archi- 
tects. But as this was a plain macadamized road flung over a' 
cyclopean archway, Tennyson evidently thought the path to 
heaven was a matter which ought to be attended with graver 
difficulty. Accordingly, we get a series of archways separated 
by rivers, each one of which disappears in a clap of thunder as 
soon as Sir Galahad reaches its successor, until that gentleman 
is bodily absorbed by a cloud, leaving Sir Perceval in the midst 
of the wreck of isolated archways to scramble back, as best he 
might, to communicate the result to his colleagues. Incon- 
gruous as Milton's bridge is, it looms on our sight with vivid 
distinctness, one end resting on the jagged rocks of Pandcemo- 
* Book ii., ad finem. 

21 



322 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

ilium, and the other on the outer rim of this globe ; but Ten- 
nyson's arches, with no other buttresses than cloud-land, begin- 
ning and ending in vacancy, seem little better than the product 
of disordered dreams. In the adventure of Sir Lancelot he 
succeeds much better, the introductory portion of which is 
described with Dantesque power and minuteness : — 

Seven days I drove along the dreary deep, 

And with me drove the moon and all the stars : 

And the wind fell, and on the seventh night 

I heard the shingle grinding in the surge, 

And felt the boat shock earth, and looking up 

Behold, the enchanted bowers of Carbonek, 

A castle like a rock upon a rock, 

With chasm-like portals open to the sea, 

And steps that met the breaker ! There was none 

Stood near it but a lion on each side 

That kept the entry, and the moon was full. 

Then from the boat I leapt, and up the stairs. 

There drew my sword. With sudden-flaring manes 

These two great beasts rose upright like a man ; 

Each gript a shoulder, and I stood between ; 

And, when I would have smitten them, heard a voice — 

" Doubt not ; go forward ; if thou doubt, the beasts 

Will tear thee piecemeal." Then with violence 

The sword was dash'd from out my hand, and fell. 

And up into the sounding hall I past ; 

But nothing in the sounding hall I saw, — 

No bench, nor table, painting on the wall, 

Or shield of knight ; only the rounded moon 

Thro' the tall oriel on the rolling sea. 

To get at the meaning of all this we must allegorize. He 
who would find God must get over the sea of doubt, advance 
through the castle of belief, and seek the chambers of purity. 
Lancelot was wanting in the latter quality, and, therefore, 
though he got safely over the two former, did not realize his 
search. Sir Galahad did, and was bodily united with it, to the 
forgetfulness of everything else. Perceval, not being so dis- 



THE ART SCHOOL. 323 

entangled from earthly things as Galahad, saw the object of his 
quest, and prepared himself for the final fruition. " The Holy 
Grail " is thus, by being made emblematic of the struggle for 
holiness, brought with the other idylls to have a direct refer- 
ence to the affairs of the day. But Tennyson in the lofty 
regions of spirituality was out of his depth. The fancy 
which could idealize a drawing-room group of Belgravian 
beauties, was terribly at discount when dealing with grand figures 
clothed with radiance, whose features should have reflected 
the glories and whose hands dispensed the thunders of the other 
world. He lacked the bold imagination necessary to crowd 
space with a succession of sublime shapes and intelligible in- 
cidents, and, as a substitute for a series of palpable pictures, is 
obliged to fly to the poor resource of allegory. But a religious 
poem which cannot be made sensible without reference to 
allegory, must be in a poor way of acquiring immortality ; and 
I hardly think, were it not for its connection with " Vivien " 
and " Guinevere," that this splendid fate would be in store for 
the later production of the Laureate's pen. 

The last instalment of the Idylls displays the same pictorial 
power, the same curiosa felicitas of language, the same keen 
flashing words, casting a diamond glitter round everything they 
touch, which distinguish him above his contemporaries, and 
which, in the eyes of many, are mistaken for the more substan- 
tial embodiment of lofty ideal thought, of splendid passion, and 
creative imagination. The story of Gareth and Lynette could 
hardly have been better told. There is a brilliancy of colour, a 
minuteness of description, and a naivete of expression about 
every turn of it, which invests the extravagant incidents with 
an appearance of verisimilitude. But in order to naturalize 
the characters or impart a rational interpretation to their actions, 
we must descend to allegory, following the poet himself, who 
makes these allegorical characters introduce us to a further 
allegory ; so that in " Gareth and Lynette" we get an allegory in 
an allegory, as in "Hamlet" we are treated to a play in a play. 



32 \ ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

For the three warriors yclept Morning-star, Noon-sun, and 
Evening-star, represent the several stages of existence which 
the soul has to pass through and overcome, before it en- 
counters death, — 

The huge man-beast of boundless savagery, 

who, however, turns out to be the weakest antagonist which 
the soul has to subdue in its progress to a higher stage. That 
the grim skeleton should vanish, and resolve itself into 

The Mght/ace of a blooming boy, 
i^resh as ayfower newborn, 

is only a poetical rendering of a truth of philosophical as well 
as spiritual significance. The two sisters Lyonors and Lynette 
may denote the moral and rational part of the soul, and Gareth 
the lowly virtue of humility, which the proud reason so per- 
sistently disdains, but which, in spiritual combats, is so puis- 
sant as to be regarded by religious ascetics as the queen of 
all the virtues. So the story is left by the poet in its present 
form as a riddle for wise men to spell out, while, to the great 
bulk of his readers, who rest content with the exoteric meaning, 
and do not pierce beneath the outer rind or shell, the piece 
can only have interest, as some of the fairy tales of Andersen 
have interest, which we first formed our acquaintance with in 
the nursery, but which, on account of the novel combination of 
images, the truthfulness of the pictures, and the piquancy 
of the narrative, we are glad to renew our acquaintance with 
in maturer years. 

In the "Last Tournament" the poet gets on natural ground 
again, and we find ourselves in human company, as we wander 
with Sir Tristram towards Lyonesse, through the mellowing 
avenues of the autumn woods. Most of the scenes are painted 
with vivid distinctness. None of the incidents shock credi- 
bility. In this respect, the "Last Tournament " may be regarded 
as the most natural idyll of the series. A befitting sense of 



THE ART SCHOOL. 325 

melancholy runs through the whole of it, whether we regard 
the desolate lodge in the forest, 

Or the flfeath-^umb autumn Gripping gloom 

which darkens the closing scene ; or the thick rain which 
drenched both plume and mantle aj; the tournament, " that 
wan day " which 

Brake with a wet wind, blowing, 

and 

JVent glooming do.vn in wet and weariness ; 

or whether we regard the withered leaves dancing before the 
hall in the yellowing autumn-tide ; or the mournful moralizing 
of the fool Dagonet ; or the occasional glimpse which the poet 
gives us, along that table shore, of 

The long /ow dune and /azy p/unging sea. 

But all this is only the artistic framework to a series of pictures, 
which, however vividly coloured, are singularly wanting in 
those bold strokes of character, which sculpture the history 
of a life out of the incidents of a page, and make the features 
haunt the memory for ever. In the opening scenes, the poet 
had a fine opportunity" of representing Lancelot distracted 
between his passion for the queen, and the severe promptings 
of reason and conscience. But we get instead a mere paste- 
board creation of that gentleman, ill at ease and sighing 
wearily in the double-dragoned chair of Arthur, who has be 
taken himself to the wars, leaving his faithless knight, in lan- 
guorous mood, to preside over the jousts in his absence. 
Lancelot veils his eyes, looks askance at the stately galleries? 
where ladies with scattered jewels shone, 

Like a bank 
Of maiden snow mingled with sparks of fire, 

and is only roused out of this unnatural state of listlessness by 
the appearance of his rival, Sir Tristram, from Brittany, when, — 



326 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

His strong hands gript, 
And dinted the gilt dragons right and left, 
Until he groaned for wrath : 

for, the jaded umpire, at the sight of his rival, who appears to 
be the only gentleman who thoroughly enjoys himself, 

Yearn'd to shake 
The burthen off his heart in one full shock, 
With Tristram ev'n to death. 

But instead of breaking a lance with Sir Tristram, he is obliged 
to fling to him, as victor in the jousts, the tourney prize, the 
carcanet of rubies, which Sir Tristram intends for the neck of 
Queen Isolt, his adulterous love in Cornwall, whither he pro- 
ceeds to lay the jewels at her feet. 

The characters in the " Last Tournament " are very vaguely 
pictured. The poet succeeds much better with the fool 
Dagonet, whom he confronts with Sir Tristram on the morning 
of his journey, and whose quaint and mournful lessons ad- 
mirably suit the moral tone and purpose of the idyll. For 
Dagonet, with the keenness of one of the Greek fates, whose 
functions he seems to discharge, dives into the heart of what is 
passing around him, fathoms the follies of Sir Tristram, and 
does not forbear to fling them in his teeth. In fact, Dagonet 
serves the purpose of the fool in "Lear," except that the 
Laureate infuses into his witticisms the lessons of the moralist, 
and makes him too philosophic for his vocation. For the taunt 
of Sir Tristram — 

Here be they 
Who knew thee swine enow before I came, 
Smuttier than blasted grain — 

only serves to direct the fool's keen introspective glance upon 
himself : — 

Swine ? I have wallow'd, I have "wash'd — the world 
Is flesh and shadow — I have had my day. 



THE ART SCHOOL. 327 

The dirty nurse, experience, in her kind 
Hath foul'd me — an' I wallow'd, then I wash'd— 
I have had my day and my philosophies — 
And thank the Lord I am King Arthur's fool. 

But all this only constitutes a very effective background 
to the piece, and by no means supplies the place of those 
flashes of genius which we miss in the embodiment of the 
principal characters of the poem. 

In this piece, we get more glimpses of King Arthur than in 
any other of the idylls. But these are of so broken and mo- 
mentary a character, as to impart a shadowy appearance to 
what ought to be the most substantial feature of the poem. 
When the features of Arthur are sketched by Sir Tristram, 
though the portrait is somewhat out of place in his love-scene 
with Queen Isolt, the poet succeeds, as he always does in his 
pen-and-ink sketches, to the satisfaction of everybody : — 

Methought, when first 
I rode from our rough Lyonesse, and beheld 
That victor of the Pagan throned in hall — 
His hair, a sun that ray'd from off a brow 
Like hill-snow high in heaven, the steel-blue eyes, 
The golden beard that clothed his lips with light — 
Moreover, that weird legend of his birth, 
With Merlin's mystic babble about his end 
Amazed me ; then, his foot was on a stool 
Shaped *as a dragon ; he seem'd to me no man, 
But Michael trampling Satan. 

But when we seek for a substantial embodiment of these 
features in the only exploit of Arthur which the poet records, 
we are doomed to disappointment. For while Sir Tristram 
falls asleep in 

The lodge of intertwisted beechen — boughs, 
Furze-cramm'd and bracken-rooft, the which himself 
Built for a summer day with Queen Isolt 
Against a shower — 

and is dreaming of a struggle between Queen Isolt and his 



328 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

bride for the tourney prize, the poet draws aside the curtains 
of space, to present his hero to us in the struggle with the 
northern ' marauders, whither he had despatched him at the 
opening of the poem. But Arthur, instead of performing any- 
thing worthy of note, is really little more than a powerless 
spectator of the doings of others : — 

Arthur with a hundred spears 
Rode far, till o'er the illimitable reed, 
And many a glancing plash and sallowy isle, 
The wide-wing'd sunset of the misty marsh 
Glared on a huge machicolated tower 
That stood with open doors, whereout was roll'd 
A roar of riot, as from men secure 
Amid their marshes, ruffians at their ease 
Among their harlot brides. 

Upon Arthur's blowing a great horn which hung upon a tree 
before the tower, the red knight within 

In blood-red armour sallying howl'd to the king, — 

" The teeth of hell flay bare and gnash thee flat ! 

Lo ! art thou not that eunuch-hearted king, 

Who fain had dipt free manhood from the world — 

The woman- worshipper ? Yea, God's curse, and I ! 

Slain was the brother of my paramour 

By a knight of thine, and I that heard her whine 

And snivel, being eunuch-hearted too, 

Sware by the scorpion-worm that twists in hell, 

And stings itself to everlasting death, 

To hang whatever knight of thine I fought 

And tumbled. Art thou king? Look to thy life ! " 

But Arthur, seeing the knight drunk, 

Deign'd not use of word or sword, 
But let the drunkard, as he stretch'd from horse 
To strike him, overbalancing his bulk, 
Down from the causeway heavily to the swamp 
Fall, as the crest of some slow- arching wave, 
Heard in dead night along that table shore, 
Drops flat, and after the great waters break, 



THE ART SCHOOL. 329 

Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves, 

Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, 

From less and less to nothing ; thus he fell 

Head-heavy, while the knights, who watched him, roar'd. 

The Knights then enter the tower, and, against the wish of 
Arthur, who cannot make himself heard in the melee, sword 
the inmates right and left, and fire the building, whose 
flames red pulsing beat against the sky; when the curtain 
falls upon Arthur vainly shouting in the midst of this little 
massacre, and Sir Tristram's sleep having accomplished its 
purpose, that gentleman resumes his journey, and Arthur once 
more vanishes into oblivion. 

Now no one can call in question either the fidelity of the 
picture to nature, or the splendid aptness of the marine illustra- 
tion, or the beauty of the landscape in which the scene is set ; 
but as far as the character of the principal actor is concerned, 
he is simply a very polished but very weak personage, who is 
jerked up and down like a wire-drawn figure, not so much in 
accordance with any pyschological traits of character as the 
necessities of the poet's situation. In striking out novel 
similitudes, in reproducing natural scenery, or in any other 
artistic details, Tennyson shows himself complete master of his 
subject; it is only when he comes to exhibit any grand bursts 
of passion, or salieut features of character, that he allows his 
subject to master him.. 

Tennyson is decidedly wanting in versatility. His range of 
power is contracted. In the drama nothing, in epic nothing, 
in satire and choral poetry nothing. In that form of lyric 
which idealizes the love sentimentality of patrician life, he is 
effective, but this is only a corner of the subject, and by no 
means entitles him to rank with those who, like Burns and 
Moore, have struck all the chords of amatory song. In elegy 
he is strong. His exquisite pathos, his artistic touches, the 
melancholy moodiness of his style, lightened with broken 
gleams of hope, like gloom furrowed by sunlight, entitle 



33° ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

him to rank with Gray as the first English elegiac poet 
after Shelley and Milton. Gray, indeed, he surpasses in 
depth ; but the style and execution of Gray more than 
compensate for this superiority, for Gray has obtained by one 
effort what Tennyson has failed to compass in two hundred : — 
at least, I suppose, there is no one who would not rather have 
written the " Lines in a Country Churchyard " than 

" By night we lingered on the lawn," 

which is the best of the pieces in the " In Memoriam." Among 
narrative poets his place is high, but certainly not so high as 
to place him among the first group. His conceptions are 
always flushed with an exquisite air of ideality ; but this 
ideality never rises into the region of imaginative passion, or 
of bold sublimity. He lacks invention and sustained fire and 
energy, quite as much as he abounds in happy strokes of com- 
parison, in deep pathos, and in elaborately coloured design. 
Hence, in heroic narrative, Tennyson's place must always be 
second class. But in single idyllic subjects, which appeal to 
the simple feelings of the heart and the tutored instincts of 
' the eye, we have as little difficulty in placing his name among 
the first. 

Tennyson has only written two odes, and it would have been 
better for his fame had he not written any. The "Ode to 
Memory " has long since been consigned to oblivion ; and I am 
sorry now to exercise an act of memory with regard to it. That 
on the death of the Iron Duke has been the subject of muci 
eulogy, but it would be difficult to assign any intrinsic reason 
for it. The ode is simply descriptive of the burial, with rather 
a prosaic account of the virtues which transformed the warrior, 
not into a hero by any means, but into a very indifferent states- 
man. In prose, the thoughts would have been esteemed very 
flat, and such as the most mediocre rhymester of the day might 
have accomplished without feeling himself one inch higher on 
that account. What can be tamer than 



THE ART SCHOOL. 331 

No more in soldier fashion will he greet 
With lifted hand the gazer in the street. 
O friends, our chief State oracle is mute : 
Mourn for the man of long-enduring blood, 
The statesman-warrior, moderate, resolute, 
While in himself, a common good. 
Mourn for the man of amplest influence, 
Yet clearest of ambitious crime, 
Our greatest, yet with least pretence, 
Great in council, and great in war, 
Foremost captain of his time, 
Rich in saving common sense. 

* * * * ^ Is 

Hush, the dead march wails in the people's ears ; 

The dark crowd moves, and there are sobs and tears, 

The black earth yawns : the mortal disappears ; 

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust ; 

He is gone who'seem'd so great, — 

Gone ; but nothing can bereave him 

Of the force he made his own, 

Being here, and we believe him, 

Something far advanced in state, 

And that he wears a truer crown 

Than any wreath that man can weave him. * 

The only point worthy of any consideration in the poem is 
the awakening the spirit of Nelson to greet the ashes of his 
great land compeer, about to be placed by his side — a feature, by 
the way, very much elaborated by the newspapers of the period, 
before the ode made its appearance ; and which Tennyson has 
only rendered in the plainest language : — 

" Who is he that cometh, like an honoured guest, 

With banner and with music, with soldier and with priest, 

With a nation weeping, and breaking on my rest ? " 

' ' Mighty seaman, this is he 

Was great by land as thou by sea. 

Thine island loves thee well, thou famous man, 

The greatest sailor since our world began. 

Now to the roll of muffled drums 

To thee, the greatest soldier comes ; 

* St. 4 and 9. 



332 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

For this is he 

Was great by land as thou by sea ; 
His foes were thine ; he kept us free ; 
O give him welcome — This is he."* 

The prelude to this is simply odious. Had the task fallen upon 
Dryden, or even Campbell, how differently would they have 
evoked the shades of the two heroes, making the grave luminous 
with the lightning flashes which defy its terrors, and with the 
splendour which invests the soul beyond it. But Tennyson con- 
fronted a mighty subject with the trite conceptions and weak 
language of Shadwell, and falls not only below his theme, but 
himself. 

The fact is, odes require very few of those qualities in which 
Tennyson is most proficient, and very many of those qualities 
which he entirely wants. Artistic touches, pretty enamel- 
painting, objective diffuseness, — for these, choral poetry affords 
little scope. But it demands broad conceptions, great fire and 
impetuosity in their realization, and that architectonic skill with 
which the mind out of its own materials erects a gorgeous dome 
of spiritual creation. None of these qualities has Tennyson 
displayed in any force. In battle-pieces, he impresses his reader 
neither with the savage fury of the onslaught, nor the reel and 
the shock of the resisting column. His martial descriptions 
assume almost the dry character of a despatch, whereas 
Campbell and Scott make us spectators of the fray, stifle us 
with its smoke, dazzle us with its lightnings, and deafen us with 
its thunders. Let the reader compare Tennyson's " Balaklava 
Charge" with the "Battle of Hohenlinden;" or the Laureate's 
account of King Arthur's fights, or of those of the Duke of 
Wellington's, with the " Vision in Lochiel," and he will realize 
the difference between the bugle's martial note and that of a 
child's penny trumpet. Tennyson made another effort in his 
" Maud " to change his pastoral pipe, in the management of which 
he is so effective,'_for the clarion of Tyrtaeus ; but the attempt, 

* St. 6. 



THE ART SCHOOL. 333 

though made with vast effort, was as fruitless as those terrible 
proclamations which Sir Charles Napier used to address to his 
fleet in the Baltic, and by which he led us to believe he was on 
the eve of annihilating the Russian empire. What, for instance, 
could be more spasmodic and unmeaning than the concluding 
lines of " Maud," culminating in the absurdity — 

And now by the side of the black and the Baltic deep, 
And deathful grinning mouths of the fortress, flames 
The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire ? 

Both Napier's ships and the poet's verses were equally 
incompetent to produce any impression upon the people for 
whom they were severally intended. Tennyson's eminence, 
indeed, in the idyll and simple pastoral subjects, seems to unfit 
him for the loftier summits of Parnassus. He seems entirely 
wanting in power to awaken dread, to arouse enthusiasm, 
or inspire terror. His imagination has not the power to 
shape awful images into palpable individualities, and flash 
them on the mind with the impress of truth. These are the 
grand tests of lofty poetry, when combined with architec- 
tonic skill j and not delicate sentimentalities, or artistic pictures 
of humble life, no matter however exquisite or faultless the 
execution may be. 

Tennyson's place among the poets of his century must be esti- 
mated according to the nature of the qualities in which he excels, 
and those in which he falls beneath his predecessors. If he is 
inferior to Campbell in the war lyric, in sublime flights of imagi- 
nation, and in lofty and impassioned poetry, he certainly rivals 
him in exquisite pathos, while he ranks above him in the artistic 
embellishment and conception of his subjects, in the simple idyll 
of common life, and in the softer graces of conventional love sen- 
timent. If Tennyson could never have written the " Mariners of 
England," or the " Last Man," Campbell could never have written 
"Enoch Arden," or "The Princess." " Theodora " is one of 
Campbell's worst productions; in the hands of Tennyson, it 



334 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

would have been one of his best. Had Tennyson written " Ger- 
trude of Wyoming," he would have risen as high above Camp- 
bell, in the simple idyllic parts of the subject, as he would have 
sunk below him, in the martial or impassioned parts of it. The 
question is, which is the superior poet ? perhaps it would appear 
unjust to either to pronounce an opinion. Both are great in 
their peculiar line of art. But Tennyson's mind has under- 
gone more artistic training than the other. Campbell, how- 
ever, undoubtedly excels in genius, Tennyson in talent. But 
Tennyson in his pieces always displays his talent, and Camp- 
bell only occasionally exhibits his genius. If we judge by isolated 
passages, the superiority would lie with Campbell ; if by the 
average tenor of their productions, the palm might be awarded 
to Tennyson. But the rule of criticism is trenchant, and as 
Campbell succeeds far better than Tennyson in the higher 
walks of his art, a loftier place must be awarded to him in the 
English Parnassus. 

Contrasted with the loftier poets of his century, the Laureate 
will have more difficulty in maintaining his ground. Byron is 
far above him in every quality except that of moral dignity, and 
a genuine and more catholic appreciation of the destinies of hu- 
manity. In graphic dealing with incidents of plot, in construction, 
in delineation of character, in the broad handling of materials ; 
in fact, in all the qualities of narrative poetry, except, perhaps, 
in that of sustained amatory passion and ideal grace and 
tenderness, Scott will be found eminently his superior. Yet out 
of complex narrative poetry, in the bucolic idyll, in the artistic 
embodiment of simple or mythical heroic life, in deep-toned 
elegy and subdued pathos, Scott must own his inferiority. The 
question is, whether a deeper insight into the beauties of the 
material universe, a persistent effort to realize a broader view 
of the poet's office, a more multiplied excellence in the lower 
walks of the art, can balance the marvellous power which 
Scott has displayed in resuscitating chivalry? I venture to 
think not. The powers which Tennyson displays, in the minor 



THE ART SCHOOL. 335 

sphere of his art, are more than counterbalanced by the qualities 
which Scott displays in one of the higher branches alone. If 
Tennyson has elegiac pathos, Scott has fire and martial ardour; 
if Tennyson excels in artistic conception, Scott surpasses him 
in delineation of character. If Tennyson is superior in the ideal 
handling of his subjects, Scott is no less effective in realizing the 
rich colouring and variegated phases of actual life. In architectonic 
skill, Tennyson is a child, and Scott is a giant. Hence, as works 
of art, " Marmion," " The Minstrel," and " The Lady of the 
Lake," must always rank higher than any of the fragmentary 
idylls Tennyson has written, notwithstanding that in all of 
these, there may be glimpses injo a higher order of poetic con- 
ception than was vouchsafed to Scott. The result of this view 
is, that in power of dealing with a great subject, Scott is far 
above Tennyson, and in the art of dealing with a little subject, 
Tennyson is far above Scott. In poetry, the ideal must ever 
carry it over the real, the breadth of the subject and the mode 
of treatment being equal. But in Tennyson the ideal is fraction- 
ized and reproduced in fragments like gleams of light through 
patched windows; whereas in Scott, the real is reproduced with 
the solidarity of an unbroken shaft of flame lighting up the 
whole framework of an age buried in the darkness of oblivion. 
Tennyson has more kinship with Wordsworth and Shelley 
than with any other poets of his century. But the advantage 
he has over the Lake poet in passionate sentiment and in 
ideal grace, by no means makes up for his lack of tlie 
philosophical breadth and deep spirituality which pervade the 
writings of his great contemporary. Over Shelley, I do not 
know that the Laureate has the advantage in any one quality, 
which enters into the composition of the poet. To both these 
writers he stands in the same relation as a copyist to an 
original. Indeed, his poetry may be said to be a cross be- 
tween the rich spirituality of the one, and the mellow plaintive- 
ness and impassioned fervour of the other. But these two 
tendencies in Tennyson, instead of imparting to each other 



336 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

fuller development, have stunted each other's growth. Shelley's 
deep passion, his lyrical sweetness, his worship of ideal beauty, 
lose much of their force, when checked by the double curb of 
monastic dogma and Wordsworthian ethics, just as the broad 
sweep of Wordsworth's didactic muse and his homely simpli- 
city is strikingly impaired by being associated with feminine 
domination, and the refined sentiment which constitutes the 
amatory phase of fashionable life. The fact is, the position 
Tennyson has taken up in art is about as incongruous as the 
position he has taken up in philosophy. We have love-passion 
expressed in homiletic language, bald simplicity combined 
with perfumed conceits, and subjection to feminine influence 
formulated into one of the first laws of the philosophic world. 
His poetry, like that of the architectural fashions and dogmatic 
views of the day, seems to be the result of a capricious eclec- 
ticism. But Greek temples with gothic lights in Christian 
churchyards, or mediaeval gables with Byzantine cupolas, 
would hardly be more conflicting than the elements Tennyson 
has endeavoured to blend in the same composition. In this, 
he has only followed his age, and not endeavoured, like his 
more gifted predecessors, to dominate it, by inaugurating a new 
school, or by launching forth startling opinions. But, con- 
sidering his contracted stand-point, Tennyson, perhaps, has 
accomplished as much as could be achieved by a poet in his 
situation, and the age could hardly have produced a better 
or more exalted representative of its poetical capacity. 



ANDROTHEIST SCHOOL. 337 



CHAPTER XII. 

ANDROTHEIST SCHOOL. 

THE grave and stately muse of the Laureate has produced 
a reaction in the pagan and voluptuous verses of Swin- 
bourne. In Tennyson, the pantheism is incoherently allied 
with belief in formal Christianity. Swinbourne tramples upon 
Christian dogmas with the spirit of Celsus, and embraces that 
form of pantheism which regards man as the highest unit of in- 
telligence, and which rej ects all belief in a future state. * Woman 
is the favourite theme of both. But in Tennyson, she is the 
chaste daughter of Heaven, the home of all virtues, the nurse 
of all tender delight, the one gift by which the labours of 
life are sweetened, the golden beam gilding the world's 
tempests and sorrows. In Swinbourne, she is the source 
of bitterness, made more painful by the sweetness with 
which the torment is preluded, the subject of blasphemy 
against the most high gods, the engine of their wrath when 
they plot the destruction of men, the curse which makes the 
fruit of life tarn to ashes on the lip, the strong note of discord 
which jars the otherwise rich concert of music, harmonizing the 
elements of the world. We find the root of this sentiment in 

* And as a man before was from his birth, 
So shall a man be after among the dead. 

Genesis. 
22 



338 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

" Atalanta," but it is conspicuous in " Chastelard," and over- 
flows his ballads and poems. The most that can be said is, 
that these conceptions are new to English literature, though they 
are by no means in substance original, whatever novelty may 
be displayed in their treatment, or force in their execution. 
They are exemplifications in verse of the blase style of the 
modern school of French novelists, who write like men hun- 
gering after pleasures of which they feel the bitterness, and 
who, though panting with desire, regard living voluptuousness 
as dead, in their sight, as charred ashes ! 

The French sensualism of the restoration-epoch, which 
found its features reflected in the pages of Rochester and 
Sedley, surrounded love with lewd mirth and coarse fri- 
volity. But the school of which Swinbourne and Beau- 
delaire are the exponents, drapes its orgies with the funereal 
appendages of the charnel vault, and the austere sanctities of 
religion. By the one, Venus is introduced to us as the mother 
of tavern gaieties, thoughtless of the morrow, scattering 
flowers and loose jests along her paths ; by the other as a 
sumptuous courtezan, with her head bound with snakes, and her 
breasts with poisonous garlands. I think, however, there is 
little fear of either school domesticating itself among us. 
Englishmen in general are too saturnine to make love a 
theme for thoughtless profanity ; and English women embody 
too many types of beauty, and protract their bloom too long, 
ever to inspire a sense of satiated languor or jaded reminiscence. 
I am, therefore, sorry that Mr. Swinbourne has so far wasted his 
high powers upon a style so little likely to win for him a 
durable reputation. These powers, judging by what he has 
given us, if properly directed, ought to win for him a high 
place in our literature. The lyrical faculty in abundance, 
perfect ease and skill over the harmonious cadences of the 
language, plastic force in moulding his conceptions, beauty of 
description, great fire and dash in his execution, — all these 
qualities do not constitute poetic greatness in themselves, 



ANDROTHEIST SCHOOL. 339 

but are an earnest of that which is to come. When these 
qualities are accompanied with great earnestness of purpose, 
with great love of liberty, an intense desire to overthrow the 
idols of the age, — to enrich its watery veins with the blood of 
new thoughts and principles, and disperse its mawkish conven- 
tionalities, by recalling its tastes to the fount of genuine nature, 
that it may rise, Antseus-like, refreslied with giant strength, 
after having drank at the well-spring of its mother earth, — the 
assemblage of all these characteristics, in one mind, announces 
the first bright gleams of a brilliant future flushing the poetic 
horizon, like the streaks of morning in a southern latitude, when 
indicative of a glorious day. But to realize the great hopes of 
which he gives us the promise, Mr. Swinbourne must get rid of 
his Gallic predilections, of his airy abstractions, and his anti- 
Christian virulence. He must recognize in Christianity more 
good than he is willing to acknowledge, and in Paganism more 
evil than he is willing to admit. He must universalize his poetry, 
dealing more with its general elements, as they exist in the 
human breast, rather than with particular embodiments, as 
they exist in peculiar coteries, or sectional divisions of society. 
His productions, up to the present, are caviare to the million. 
None but the highly educated classes are capable of under- 
standing them. Hence the foolish outcry which has been 
raised on the score of their lewdness, which to my mind they 
are rather calculated to restrain than excite. But it is not the 
first time that an offence against good taste has been construed 
into an outrage upon morality. 

But the greatest obstacle in Mr. Swinbourne's path is a certain 
wordiness, which often outstrips his conceptions, and not 
unfrequently interferes with the delineation of them. When he 
has not the sterling ore of sparkling thought, he attempts to 
palm upon us, as a substitute, mere jingling expression. This 
vice is not so prevalent in his "Chastelard" as in his "Atalanta," 
and not so prevalent in his " Atalanta " as in his miscellaneous 
poetry. It, however, culminates in his " Song for Italy," which 



34o ESI IMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

is one of the most recent and the most prosy emanation of his 
muse. Efflorescence may be admitted to be characteristic of 
youth. But as youthful genius advances to maturity, we ex- 
pect the mere flower of blossom to decline and the fruit to 
become manifest. In Swinbourne's case, however , these ex- 
pectations have only been partially realized. The day has not 
yet fulfilled the bright promise of the dawn. If he improves as 
he gets older, the development of force is not so rapid as the 
earlier exhibitions of his genius led us to expect. It is not that 
he remains stationary, while his themes advance in interest, but 
that he deals with his subjects after a fashion which prevents 
him from doing full justice to his powers. To take Mr. 
Swinbourne's miscellaneous verses in the order of time, we 
should, I fear, have to read them, Hebrew fashion, backwards. 
The last poems in his "Ballads" are doubtless his first, and as we 
approach the beginning the increase in power is manifest. 
This is descending to an artifice which we should have been 
spared. For the merit of the verses in the first half of the 
volume only makes the reader more devoutly wish that those in 
the latter part had been committed to the flames. The "Hymn 
to Proserpine/' the "Verses before Dawn," the Interlude, and the 
Match, had they been less enigmatical, would have been in 
Goethe's best manner. The " Dolores " evinces great force and 
rapidity of conception, but the analogies running through it 
are so profane and unnatural as to countervail the vigour dis- 
played in its execution. What end can be really served in 
applying the apostrophes in the catholic litany of the Virgin, 
with an air of sober sadness, to the orgies of Priapus, except 
to outrage religious feeling, and disgust a wide section of the 
community? Nearly all the poems in this volume are upon 
love; but we get no higher conception of the passion than 
floats through the brain of a voluptuary when he lies in the 
arms of a courtezan, or when he rises late, with his brain 
reeling from the fumes of the last night's debauch. Whatever 
is against nature cannot be the subject of any lofty emotion or 



ANDROTHEIST SCHOOL. 341 

grand exhibition of genius. Love takes its rise in the soul, 
which hallows the material phases of its enjoyment. But human 
nature is represented with the wrong end uppermost, when this 
order is inverted, and when the lower instincts are enthroned 
in the seat of the spiritual passion. 

Few of Swinbourne's ballads and poems are likely to survive, 
not so much from the want of power, as from the misdirection 
of it. An early extinction, I fear, for the same reason is impend- 
ing over " Chastelard," notwithstanding the force displayed in 
certain parts of it. The characters are false, the situation 
unnatural, the plot void of interest. There wants the healthy 
ring of human action in it. It is impossible to construct a 
five-act play out of a few sensual love passages between a half- 
crazed knight and two or three idle Court women. Besides, 
Mary, Queen of Scots, has not yet become the Clytemnestra 
of history, however much it may suit the poet's purpose to 
make her so. Is the highest type of feminine beauty, in Mr. 
Swinbourne, always to be associated with the Circes of old 
Rome or mediaeval Italy, who did not leave the victims whom 
they had snared in the meshes of their beauty, the poor choice 
between the poison -bowl and the stiletto? Are we, when 
the poet surrounds us with lovely women, always to have the 
fable of the Syrens accepted in its literal sense, and the best 
handiworks of God's creation pourtrayed as banqueting on 
men's flesh, surrounded with the skulls of one generation, and 
gloating over the ruin of another ? This is only a corner, — a 
very waste corner of passion, emblematic of the effects of its 
unbridled indulgence. Why should it be thrust forward in the 
foreground, as if it constituted the whole of the picture ? 

There is so much the less excuse for the one-sided develop- 
ment of " Chastelard," as the author has shown in his " Atalanta " 
great power of dealing with the broader range of human action, 
even when trammelled by the narrow rules of Greek art, and 
has produced a play which will live probably as long as anything 
of the sort in the language. The plot is worked out and the 



342 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

characters conceived with great skill. The choruses are as 
lyrical as anything in "Manfred" or "Prometheus; " though they 
may lack the incisiveness of the one, and the sublimity of the 
other. The boar-slaying is a marvel of description, standing 
out with bold minuteness, as if the picture had been photo- 
graphed from the frieze of a Greek temple. But Swinbourne 
has not yet fulfilled the expectations he raised by this produc- 
tion, which, taken by itself, would not, on account of its Greek 
dress and imitative spirit, be calculated to place his name very 
high in the third rank of our literature. It has no bearing, 
either metaphysical or allegorical, on the tendencies of the pre- 
sent time. It lifts up no curtain by which we either unriddle 
the past, or get a glimpse into the future. The " Atalanta" only 
interests us as a work of art, and, for a young poet, it is a work 
of great promise and nothing more. 

Since the " Chastelard," Mr. Swinbourne's muse has confined 
itself to fragmentary pieces. I do not know whether he mis- 
trusts his capacity to build up a great constructive poem, but, 
judging from his last volume, if such a feeling be entertained by 
himself, it will not be shared by his readers. This, though 
consisting of a number of detached pieces, is a notable advance 
upon his previous efforts. The "Songs before Sunrise/ 5 which 
embody the poet's pantheistic views and republican fervour, for 
force and vigour are unsurpassed, if not unequalled, by any 
isolated utterances of the same sort in our literature. There 
is something sublime in the conception of the world being 
immersed in darkness, of all antecedent developments being so 
many tentative approaches to the light about to dawn ; and in 
the picture of men elate with hope, jubilant with joy or de- 
pressed with fear, according as their interests are likely to be 
effected by the impending change. But giving the author 
full credit for all the beauty of form, the graces of expression, 
the subtle analogies, and the linked music long drawn out, 
which most of these pieces manifest, it would be extremely 
hazardous to predict for them a world-wide reputation, on 



ANDROTHEIST SCHOOL. 343 

account of the reiterated allegories, the dry abstract concep- 
tions, and the extreme spirit of personification which they 
exhibit. There is a lack of human interest in them, an attempt 
to substitute airy abstractions for tangible realities, which go 
far to neutralize, if they do not entirely swamp, those high 
poetic gifts with which they prove their author to be endowed. 
If these pieces manifest a great increase of poetic power, it is 
increase in a wrong direction. The political and anti-Chris- 
tian views which Swinbourne so fearlessly puts forth in this 
volume, are identical with those of Shelley. He also adopts 
the metres and imitates the style of his master. But with all 
Shelley's subtlety of intellect, with all his power of clothing 
abstract conceptions in musical language, Swinbourne lacks 
his pathos, his deep tenderness, his imaginative power, and 
dreamy spirituality. The constructive efforts with which 
Shelley idealized his doctrines in the " Revolt of Islam," and 
" Prometheus Unbound," Swinbourne does not even attempt to 
follow; and until he does so, it would be premature to forecast 
the place he is destined to occupy in the British Parnassus. 
There is, however, a terribly earnest spirit about each of these 
fragmentary pieces, as well as one or two leading conceptions, 
running through the whole of them, which stamp them all with 
the impress of the same image. The author supposes society 
in its last phase of darkness, just preceding the first faint streaks 
of that golden day which is about to dawn on humanity. The 
old faith in a personal deity is dying out : — 

" Thou art smitten, Thou God, Thou art smitten, Thy death is upon thee, 

O Lord, 
And the love song of earth, as Thou diest, resounds through the wind of her 

wings. " 

And the new belief of man in himself, as the highest incarnation 
of the godlike, is on the eve of regenerating humanity : — 

" Thou art judged, O judge, and the sentence is gone forth against thee, 
OGod, 



344 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Thy slave that slept is awake, thy slave has slept for a span, 

Yea, man, thy slave shall unmake thee, who made thee Lord over man. 

For his face is set to the east, his feet on the past, and its dead, 

The sun rearisen is his priest, and the heat thereof hallows his head. 

His eyes take part in the morning ; his spirit outsounding the sea, 

Asks no more witness or warning from temple or tripod or tree. 

* * * * * 

Time's motion that throbs in his blood is the thought that gives heart to 

the skies, 
And the springs of the fire that is food to the sunbeams are light to his 

eyes. 
The minutes that beat with his heart, are the words to which worlds keep 

chime, 
And the thought in his pulses is part of the blood and the spirit of time. 
Will ye feed him with poisonous dust, and restore him with hemlock for 

drink, 
Till he yield you his soul up in trust, and have heart not to know or to 

think ? 
He hath stirred him, and found out the flaw in his fetters, and cast them 

behind, 
His soul to his soul is a law, and his mind is a light to his mind. 
The seal of his knowledge is sure, the truth and his spirit are wed, 
Men perish, but man shall endure ; lives die, but the life is not dead. 
He hath sight of the secrets of season, the roots of the years and the fruits, 
His soul is at one with the reason of things that is sap to the roots ; 
He can hear in their changes a sound, as the conscience of consonant 

spheres, 
He can see through the years flowing round him, the law lying under the 

years, 
Who are ye that would bind him with curses, and blind him with vapour 

of prayer? 
Your might is as night that disperses, when light is alive in the air, 
The bow of your Godhead is broken, the arm of your conquest is stayed.* 

This new spirit of regenerated manhood, which is stamped 
in the Mazzinian mould, is to find its ark of safety in a repub- 
lic, which shall knit together the different nations in one com- 
mon bond of fellowship and love. In the " Eve of Revolution," 
''The Litany of Nations," and the " Mater Triumphalis," each 

* "Hymn of Man." 



ANDROTHEIST SCHOOL. 345 

poems of great beauty, the political views of the great Genoese 
republican find powerful but fragmentary exposition. 

In the " Eve of Revolution," the poet, after the manner of 
Ezekiel, is commanded by a spirit to arouse the nations from the 
corners of the earth by the blast of a trumpet, to cast off the 
torpor which yet benumbs their limbs, and fulfil the glorious 
destiny for which each has been preparing in the slow night 
of ages : — 

" I set the trumpet to my lips, and blow — 

The height of night is shaken, the skies break ; 
The winds and stars and waters come and go 

By fits of breath, and light and sound, that wake 
As out of sleep, and perish as the show 

Built up of sleep, when all her strengths forsake 
The sense-compelling spirit ; the depths glow, 
The heights flash, and the roots and summits shake 
Of earth, in all her mountains 
And the inner foamless fountains, 
And well-springs of her fast-bound forces quake ; 
Yea, the whole air of life 
Is set on fire of strife 
Till change unmake things made, and love remake ; 

Reason and love, whose names are one, 
Seeing reason is the sunlight shed from love the sun." 

Asia, Greece, Italy, Spain, and the western nations, are thus 
apostrophised with great power, and represented as shaking off 
the torpor which has oppressed them in the sleep of ages. 
Spain and France are repentant ; but Greece and Italy pant 
for freedom with virginal souls unsoiled by the embraces of 
tyrants \ while England, overridden by the nightmare of wealth 
and aristocratic respectability, is the slowest of her sisters to 
awaken to the new light forcing its way through her eyelids. The 
poet in addressing Russia had, doubtless, in his ken the late 
ukase manumitting her serfs. The shapings of his imagination 
here are, therefore, even more instinct with life than elsewhere, 
having some solid substratum in actual truth : — 



346 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

"I set the trumpet to my lips and blow, 

The night is broken northward ; the pale plains 
And footless fields of sun-forgotten snow 

Feel through their creviced lips and iron veins 
Such quick breath labour, and such clear blood flow, 

As summer-stricken spring feels in her pains 
When dying May bears June, too young to know 
The fruit which waxes from the flower that wanes ; 
Strange tyrannies and vast, 
Tribes frost-bound to their past, 
Lands that are bound all through their length with chains, 

Wastes where the winds' wings ache, 
And anguish of blind snows, and rack -blown rains, 
And ice that seals the white sea's lips, 
Whose monstrous weights crush flat the sides of shrieking ships.'" 

In the " Litany of Nations," each European commonwealth 
severally and conjointly call upon their everlasting mother, earth, 
to care their woes ; and by the share they already have had in 
developing the spirit of liberty, to complete the new birth, and 
usher in the golden day which the poet regards as the millennium 
of humanity. The republic of the future, in her present aspects, 
is shadowed forth under the name of mater dolorosa, as one 
wayworn and besprent with blood and dust : — 

Who is she that sits by the way, by the wild way-side, 
In a rent-stained garment, the robes of a cast-off bride ; 
In the dust, in the rainfall, sitting, with soiled feet bare, 
With the night for a garment upon her, with torn wet hair ? 
She is fairer of face than the daughters of men, and her eyes 
Worn through with her tears, are deep as the depth of the skies. 
This is she for whose sake being fallen, for whose abject sake, 
Earth groans in the blackness of darkness, and men's hearts break : 
This is she for whose love, having seen her, the men that were 
Poured life out as water, and shed their souls upon air : 
This is she for whose glory their years were counted as foam, 
Whose face was a light upon Greece, was a fire upon Rome. 

But in the " Mater Triumphalis," this spirit of liberty, identi- 
fied with that of pantheism, is addressed in language which 



ANDROTHEIST SCHOOL. 347 

combines Attic beauty of form, with all the depth and fervour of 
Hebrew sublimity : — 

Thy face is as a sword smiting in sunder 

Shadows and chains and dreams and iron things ; 

The sea is dumb before thy face, the thunder 
Silent, the skies are narrower than thy wings ; 

Angels and gods, spirit and sense, thou takest 

In thy right hand, as drops of dust or dew, 
The temples and the towers of time thou breakest, 

His thoughts and words and works to make them new. 



Thy wings shadow the waters, thine eyes lighten 

The horror of the billows of the night ; 
The depths of the earth, and the dark places brighten 

Under thy feet, whiter than fire is white. 

We have known thee, and have not known thee, stood beside thee, 
Felt thy lips breathe ; set foot where thy feet trod, 

Loved and renounced, and worshipped and denied thee, 
As though thou wert but as another god. 



The night is as a seal set on men's faces — 
On faces fallen of men that take no light, 

Nor give light, in the deeps of the dark places, 
Blind things incorporate with the body of night. 

Their souls are serpents winter -bound and frozen ; 

Their shame is as a tame beast at their feet 
Couched ; their cold lips deride thee, and their chosen, 

Their lying lips made grey with dust for meat. 

Then, when their time is full and days run over, 
The splendour of thy sudden brow made bare 

Darkens the morning ; thy bared hands uncover 
The veils of light, and night, and the awful air. 

And the world, naked as a new-born maiden, 
Stands virginal and splendid as at birth, 

With all thine heaven of all its light unladen, 
Of all its love unburdened all thine earth. 



348 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

For the utter earth, and utter air of heaven, 

And the extreme depth is thine, and the extreme height ; 

Shadows of things, and veils of ages riven, 
Are as men's kings unkingdomed in thy sight. 

Through the iron years, the centuries brazen-gated 

By the ages barred impenetrable doors, 
From the evening to the morning have we waited, 

Should thy foot haply sound on the awful floors. 

The doors untrodden of the sun's feet glimmer, 
The star-unstricken pavement of the night ; 

Do the lights burn inside ? The lights wax dimmer 
On festal faces withering out of sight. 

The crowned heads lose the light on them ; it may be, 
Dawn is at hand to smite the loved feast dumb ; 

To blind the torch-lit centuries till the day be, 
The feasting kingdoms till thy kingdom come. 

Shall it not come? deny they or dissemble, 
Is it not even as lightning from on high 

Now ? and though many a soul close eyes and tremble, 
How should they tremble who love thee as I ? 

I am thine harp, between thy hands, O mother ! 

All my strong chords are strained with love of thee ; 
We grapple in love, and wrestle, as each with other 

Wrestle the wind, and the unreluctant sea. 



I am the trumpet at thy lips, thy clarion, 

Full of thy cry, sonorous with thy breath ; 
The graves of souls born worms, and creeds grown carrion 

Thy blast of judgment fills with fires of death. 

Thou art the player whose organ-keys are thunders, 

And I beneath thy foot the pedal prest ; 
Thou art the ray whereat the rent night sunders, 

And I the cloudlet borne upon thy breast. 

I shall burn up before thee, pass and perish 

As haze in sunrise, on the red sea line ; 
But thou from dawn to sunsetting shalt cherish 

The thoughts that led, and souls that lighted mine. 



ANDROTHEIST SCHOOL. 349 

This spirit of pantheism unified with that of freedom, is 
again personified in " Hertha," who is introduced as speaking 
of herself in a series of stanzas, which for beauty, music, 
subtilty of conception, and ethical fitness of expression, could 
hardly have been surpassed by Shelley : — 

I am that which began ; 

Out of me the years roll ; 
Out of me God and man ; 
I am equal and whole ; 
God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily ; I 
am the soul. 

Before ever land was, 
Before ever the sea, 
Or soft hair of the grass, 
Or fair limbs of the tree, 
Or the flesh-coloured fruit of my branches, I was, and 
thy soul was in me. 

First life on my sources 

First drifted and swam ; 
Out of me are the forces 
That save it or damn ; 
Out of me man and woman, and wild beast and bird ; 
before God was, I am. 



The storm-winds of ages 

Blow through me and cease, 
The war- wind that rages, 
The spring- wind of peace, 
Ere the breath of them roughen my tresses, ere one of 
my blossoms increase. 

All sound of all changes, 
All shadows and lights 
On the world's mountain ranges, 
And stream-riven heights, 
Whose tongue is the wind's tongue, and language of storm- 
clouds, on earth-shaking nights ; 



35o ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



All forms of all faces, 

All work of all hands, 
In unsearchable places 
Of time-stricken lands. 
All death and all life, and all reigns, and all ruins, drop 
through me as sands. 

****** 

Hast thou known how I fashioned thee, 

Child, underground? 
Fire that impassioned thee, 
Iron that bound, 
Dim changes of water, what thing of all these hast thou 
known of or found ? 

Canst thou say in thine heart 

Thou hast seen with thine eyes 
With what cunning of art 

Thou wast wrought, in what wise, 
By what force, of what stuff, thou wast shapen, and shown 
on my breast to the skies ? 

Who has given, who has sold it thee 

Knowledge of me? 
Has the wilderness told it thee ? 
Hast thou learnt of the sea ? 
Hast thou communed in spirit, with night ? have the 
winds taken counsel with thee ? 

Have I set such a star 

To show light on thy brow, 
That thou sawest from afar, 
What I show to thee now ? 
Have ye spoken as brethren together, the sun and the 
mountains and thou ? 

What is here, dost thou know it ? 

What was, hast thou known ? 
Prophet, nor poet, 

Nor tripod, nor throne, 
Nor spirit, nor flesh, can make answer, but only thy mother 
alone. 

Mother not maker, 
Born, and not made ; 



ANDROTHEIST SCHOOL. 351 

Though her children forsake her, 
Allured, or afraid, 
Praying prayers to the God of their fashion, she stirs not for 
all they have prayed. 

****** 

children of banishment, 
Souls overcast, 

Were the lights ye see vanish meant 
Always to last, 
Ye would know not the sun overshining, the shadows and 
stars overpast. 

1 saw where ye trod 

The dim paths of the night, 
Set the shadow called God, 
In your skies, to give light ; 
But the morning of manhood is risen, and the shadowless soul is 
in sight. 



For his twilight is come on him, 

His anguish is here ; 
And his spirit gaze dumb on him, 
Grown grey from his fear ; 
And his hour taketh hold on him stricken, the last of his 
infinite year. 

Thought makes him and breaks him, 

Truth slays and forgives ; 
But to you, as time takes him, 
This new thing it gives. 
Even love, the beloved republic, that feeds upon freedom 
and lives. 

For truth only is living, 

Truth only is whole, 
And the love of his giving 
Man's pole-star and pole. 
Man pulse of my centre, and fruit of my body, and seed 
of my soul. 

In " Perinde ac Cadaver," the spirity of liberty is repre- 
sented at the bedside of England, striving in vain to arouse 



352 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

that sleepy old lady to the discharge of her duties, who, how- 
ever, turns upon her couch and seems to loathe the mission 
which the tutelary goddess of humanity is thrusting upon her. 

She turned and laughed in her dream, 

With grey lips arid and cold ; 
She saw not the face as a beam 
Burn on her, but only a gleam 

Through her sleep as of new stamped gold. 

But the goddess with terrible tears, 

In the light of her down-drawn eyes, 

Spake fire in the dulled sealed ears, 

" Thou sick with slumbers and fears, 
Wilt thou sleep now indeed or arise ? 

" With dreams, and with words, and with light 
Memories and empty desires, 
Thou hast wrapped thyself round all night, 
Thou hast shut up thine heart from the right, 
And warmed thee at burnt- out fires. 
* * * " * * * 

' ' Thy poor lie slain of thine hands, 

Their starved limbs rot in thy sight, 
As a shadow, the ghost of thee stands, 
Among men living and lands, 

And stirs not leftwards or right. 

" Freeman he is not, but slave, 

Who stands not out on my side; 
His own hand hollows his grave, 
Nor strength is in me to save, 

Where strength is none to abide. 

" Time shall tread on his name, 

That was written for honour of old, 

Who hath taken in change for fame, 

Dust, and silver, and shame, 
Ashes, and iron, and gold. " 

But the respectable old lady who thinks she has done enough 
for general humanity, is quite satisfied with her comfortable 
position, and turns a deaf ear to her spiritual monitor. 

The "Watch in the Night" is a spirit-stirring piece, ringing 



ANDROTHEIST SCHOOL. 353 

through the heart like a trumpet, in which statesmen, priests, 
kings, seers, captives, exiles, Christians, warriors, and European 
nations are each in turn questioned as to what they think, 
and give their own interpretations, of the signs and tokens 
of the coming light which chequer their dim horizon. The 
vigour of the opening is sustained all through the piece : — 

" Watchman, what of the night ? " 

" Storm, and thunder, and rain, 
Lights that Avaver and wane, 

Leaving the watch-fires unlit. 
• Only the bale-fires are bright, 

And the flash of the lamps now and then, 
From a palace where spoilers sit, 

Trampling the children of men." 
****** 
" Master, what of the night ? " 
" Child, night is not at all, 

Anywhere fallen or to fall, 
Save in our star-stricken eyes. 
Forth of our eyes, it takes flight, 

Look we but once nor before, 
Nor behind us, but straight on the skies, 

Night is not then any more." 

" Exiles, what of the night ? " 

' ' The tides and the hours run out, 

The seasons of death and of doubt, 
The night-watches bitter and sore, 
In the quick sand leftward and right. 

My feet sink down under me, 
But I know the scents of the shore, 

And the broad- blown breadths of the sea. 

****** 
" Christian, what of the night?" 
' ' I cannot tell, I am blind, 

I halt, and hearken behind, 
If haply the hours will go back, 
And return to the dear dead light, 

To the watch-fires and stars that of old, 
Shone where the sky now is black, 

Glowed where the earth now is cold." 

23 



354 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

" High-priest, what of the night? " 
" The night is horrible here, 

With haggard faces and fear, 
Blood, and the burning of fire, 
Mine eyes are emptied of sight, 

Mine hands are full of the dust ; 
If the God of my faith be a liar, 

"Who is it that I shall trust ? " 

" Princes, what of the night ? " 
" Night with pestilent breath, 

Feeds us children of death, 
Clothes us close with her gloom. 
Rapine, and famine, and fright, 

Crouch at our feet and are fed ! 
Earth where we pass is a tomb, 

Life where we triumph is dead." 

The poet, in this poem, puts his readers in his position, and 
fills them, almost in their own despite, with the fiery ardour 
with which he looks forward to the coming dawn. The Tenebrae 
savours too much of Shelley's " Triumphs of Life ; " and the 
"Lines before a Crucifix " of certain passages in " Queen Mab," 
to claim the merit of originality. Nor do I think, when luscious 
poetry is made the vehicle of ribald denunciation of Christianity, 
even when original, that the author is likely to enhance his 
reputation thereby. A poet should be lothe to assail with 
wantonness an institution with which the liveliest feelings of the 
majority of his readers are associated ; and Swinbourne should 
have remembered, even from his own point of view, that Christi- 
anity merited other treatment at his hands from the services she 
has rendered in crushing slavery — the subject of his abhorrence; 
in proclaiming human equality — the subject of his adoration, 
and in bringing society nearer to the boundaries of that — 
j f ear — imaginary millennium the dawn of which he proclaims 
with so much fervour. 



POETS OF THE AFFECTIONS. 355 



CHAPTER XIII. 

POETS OF THE AFFECTIONS. 

SOME men are capable of having their intellect very much 
extended by education. There is, however, a class 
upon whom education generally acts like a convex lens, rather 
contracting than expanding their mental vision. It is not in 
any complimentary sense I would rank Montgomery in the 
former class; for he had essentially a puny intellect, capable, 
however, of great expansion, under a proper system of training, 
which he never received. Had Burns or Shakespeare gone 
through a university course, the probability is their mental 
force would have been very much impaired. The great powers 
with which nature had endowed them, would have lost much of 
their freshness by having their vigour expended upon foreign 
models, upon dry inventories of fact, or the mere mechanism 
of language. Had Shakespeare frittered away his youth in 
obtaining a control over Greek iambics, it is not in the least 
likely " Macbeth " would have been written. Had Burns 
devoted his early efforts to mastering the Principia, it is as little 
likely we should have had " Tarn O'Shanter." The influence 
of Byron's collegiate learning may be read in his " Hours of 
Idleness ;" the consequence of his emancipation from it, in 
his " Manfred" and " Childe Harold.'' But Montgomery 
was born with no such creative intellect. He had none of the 



■ - " ■ ' ■ " 



356 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

regalities of the spiritual universe about him. His powers were 
essentially of the imitative order. He caught up the echoes of 
Goldsmith and Cowper, and repeated their strains very well. 
His sympathies were with the good of every clime ; his heart 
was open to the tenderest domestic charities ; his feelings 
swelled with every generous emotion. But his mind, im- 
prisoned in the narrow confines of Moravianism, remained 
Moravian to the end of the chapter. Of philosophy in any 
sense, either as derived from books or from introspective 
contemplation, he knew nothing. Doctrinal Christianity, as he 
found it in the Sunday-school Catechism, he accepted as the 
explanation of everything. The passionate phases of man's 
emotional nature were by him regarded as contraband. Lofty 
poetry on a large scale, under such conditions, was simply 
impossible. A liberal education for such a mind would 
have done wonders. But a liberal education the Fates with- 
held. 

It was, therefore, to some extent a mistake when Montgo- 
mery wandered into the larger fields of Song. As long as he 
confined himself to themes in which the elastic sympathies of 
his heart required no lofty effort of the intellect, the result was 
a success. His smaller pieces, which merely image pictures of 
rural love, or which describe his religious feelings, or his 
passion for the beauties of nature, or his sympathy for natural 
objects, and for the destinies of common humanity, will bear 
comparison with the productions of poets of greater intel- 
lectual calibre than Montgomery. Indeed, it would not be too 
much to say, that some half-dozen of them, as his exquisite 
"Tribute to the Genius of Burns," his "Common Lot," his 
" Night," " The Field Flower," and " The Grave," are not 
inferior to anything of the same class in the language. In these 
occasional pieces, his emotions are warmly enlisted, his aesthetic 
sense finds ample room for its exercise, without making any 
great demand upon the intellectual forces in which he was so 
deficient. He, therefore, hits his mark. But when he attempted 



^i^ - ■■.■■!. 



POETS OF THE AFFECTIONS. 357 

bolder flights, and constructed elaborate poems of a dozen 
cantos, the attempt was above his powers. If he cannot be 
said to have ignominiously failed, neither can he be said to 
have fairly succeeded. In incidental scenes, where there 
is play for outbursts of his sympathetic nature, or for good 
material description, he is effective ; but in sustained power, in 
recondite or strikingly original views, in the bold manipulation 
of his subject, in passionate bursts of imagination, in fact, in all 
those qualities which can alone make a lengthy poem tolerable, 
Montgomery is simply nowhere. Among the class whose 
prejudices they flattered, and whose ignorance they suited, his 
heavy pieces once had a steady sale. But they are fast settling 
down into the limbo of works which are too indifferent to be 
read, and yet not bad enough to be entirely forgotten. 

In addition to Montgomery's mental incompetency for any 
protracted effort, he was wretchedly unfortunate in the choice 
of his subjects. Who, for example, could possibly care for an 
antediluvian poem, in ten cantos, on " The World Before the 
Flood," treated scripturally, in which the prophecy of Enoch 
is versified, and the story of Cain and Abel diffusively set 
forth ? There is much more poetry in the curt announcement of 
the Bible concerning Enoch, viz., "that his spirit walked with 
God, that Enoch was not, for God took him," than in all the 
apocryphal books respecting him, which Montgomery has so 
sedulously followed. The subject of Greenland is not redeemed 
from its chilliness by the fires which Montgomery's missionaries 
light up there. But the sudden atmospheric changes this country 
has undergone afforded him opportunity to indulge his passion 
for painting catastrophes, which he has certainly turned to ac- 
count, and "Greenland" is, undoubtedly, the best of his lengthy 
pieces. Slavery is a trite theme, and Montgomery, in " The 
West Indies,"did little more than express, in strong pentameters, 
the popular indignation on the subject. But there is no one who 
would not rather be the author of Cowper's brief castigation of 
slavery in "The Task," than the ponderous lines with which 



358 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Montgomery has only diluted the withering censure of his master. 
The "Wanderer in Switzerland," doubtless, owed much of its 
temporary success to the detestation of the French republican 
armies, whose oppressions it denounced. For there is nothing 
in the mere tale of misery inflicted which can interest the 
general reader, and Montgomery's ballad style of treatment 
does not fit it for a higher sphere than an ordinary child's 
reading-book. The formation of earth out of coral-reefs, with the 
evangelical destiny of man coming in as a pendant to his rise 
out of a series of megatheria, is about as puerile a conception 
as could possibly have been conceived. Montgomery doubt- 
less thought the way to reconcile science with religion was to 
set both at war with common sense. The " Pelican Island," 
which embraces this effort, is likewise faulty in metre. Blank 
verse is a great test of a poet's powers, and Montgomery's 
blank verse is as weak as any in the language. It is as un- 
metrical as Browning's, without one atom of Browning's terse- 
ness and versatility. 

Montgomery never rouses the passions or feeds the intellect, 
but he frequently reaches the heart. His forte is simply the 
development of our emotional sympathies in connection with 
natural objects. This ground, after Herrick and Wordsworth,, 
he cultivates as well as any writer in our language. But this is 
for the most part accomplished by the use of stereotyped phra- 
seology, which rather dominates thought than suffers itself to 
be the vehicle of its manifestation. His verses, therefore, lack 
freshness. He says in one of his prefaces, that the plot of 
ground he holds on the British Parnassus is no copyhold, that 
he borrowed it or leased it from none. But this is a delusion. 
Every verse he writes is coined in the mint of his predecessors. 
His images, his metaphors, his style of expression, are all de- 
rived from poets- of the Goldsmith type. But he occasionally 
informs them with so much fire ; he fuses them so deeply 
into the glowing furnace of his own sensibility, that they wear 
all the features of original creation. Like old vases whose 



POETS OF THE AFFECTIONS. 359 

figures have been re-cast in deeper moulds, his borrowed con- 
ceptions sparkle with the brilliancy of new metal. 

Montgomery's powers were contracted. He had neither a 
brilliant fancy, nor a lofty or passionate imagination. A sombre 
line of melancholy pervades the most of his productions. He 
could not have been facetious, had he died for it. But he is 
always tender, and occasionally pathetic. That quiet brooding 
over the abyss of the heart, the mirroring of external nature in its 
depths, for which the Hebrew psalmists were so conspicuous, a 
religious earnestness of purpose, which imported the poet's 
heart and brain into everything he wrote, his glowing fervour, 
the identification of his feelings with all the elevating tendencies 
of humanity — these are the qualities which have placed some 
of his occasional pieces on the top shelf of miscellaneous poetry. 
But while in some of his short pieces he rises above his models, in 
his lengthy and more pretentious efforts, he falls beneath them. 
There is a diffusiveness in these compositions which his occa- 
sional verses did not admit of ; for, where Montgomery had a 
broad canvas to cover, the defect of early training was con- 
spicuous in redundant expression, in a wearisome exposition of 
trifling details, in a lack of that vigorous grasp of a subject which 
could impress upon its complex branches the simple unity of a 
whole. The fact is, the miscellaneous verse in which Mont- 
gomery excelled was the fruit of his own solitary communings 
with the objects which absorbed his attention ; while the staple 
materials of his larger pieces were all imported, at second-hand, 
from books. Hence, while his "Greenland" and his "Westlndies" 
may rank, though at a respectable distance, in the same class, 
as the "Traveller" and the "Deserted Village," his three other 
long poems would rise no higher than a moderate place in the 
fourth division of poetry, as very good embodiments of reflex 
imitation. But a poet must be judged by the general arrange- 
ments of his pieces, and not by the superior excellence of some 
three or four minor poems ; and, if tested by this standard, 
Montgomery will rank above Rogers, but beneath Goldsmith. 



360 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



BETWEEN Montgomery and Longfellow, the world will 
probably think there is little in common. The one, 
spending his life in the acquisition and distribution of know- 
ledge, in personal intercourse with the most aesthetic minds of 
European capitals, in habitual oscillation between two hemi- 
spheres ; the other a shy recluse, imperfectly educated, more or 
less pinioned to the dusty purlieus of a second-class provin- 
cial town, and knowing nothing of society, but what he had 
gleaned from books. In the world of thought, however, there 
are as many resemblances as their exterior life presents of 
contrasts. Both leaven their poems very largely with the 
Christian element ; both are thoroughly in earnest in making 
poetry permeate, as it were, the very lifeblood of daily existence. 
The triumphs of both are intertwined with the representation 
of the domestic affections and the quiet charities of human life. 
With both, verse is only the medium of genial sympathies and 
moralizing lessons. Montgomery was deficient in metaphysical 
analysis; so is Longfellow. Neither could construct a great 
poem. Both have shown great power in executing short ones. 
But the superior training of Longfellow is evidenced in a better 
choice of subjects, and his more independent genius in the 
original treatment to which he has subjected ideas having little 
merit on the score of originality. 

In some respects it has been an advantage to Longfellow 
that he was born an American. In growing up under a state 
of society alien to that which had coloured the thoughts of the 



POETS OF THE AFFECTIONS. 361 

eighteenth-century poets, he was in a great degree withdrawn 
from their influence. His thoughts were, therefore, left to 
clothe themselves in their own natural dress. They are never 
dominated by expression. In this respect, he is the most natural 
poet of the age. The entirely modern elements of the society 
by which he was surrounded, threw out the mediaeval world in 
all its freshness before him. Its chivalries, its childlike faith, 
its cultivation of the ascetic virtues, its weird superstitions, its 
ceremonial pageantries, appeared to him in more startling con- 
trast, with the selfish pursuits of commerce, with the coarsening 
influence of scepticism, with the material results of industrial 
development, than to a European observer. Longfellow wan- 
dered through such old towns as Bruges, Nismes, and Bologna, 
where the architecture and traditions of the mediaeval age are 
still rife; or through the castellated cities on the Rhine, where 
its baronial feuds speak out from each topaz cliff and ruined 
turret, much with the same feeling as a European scholar paces 
the banks of the Cephissus or the Capitoline Mount. He saw 
nothing, in these phantom relics of the past, but its poetry. He 
was not tutored in a state of society, in which the mediaeval 
world had left institutions side by side with modern creations, 
to stifle social development in its growth, as the ivy, with its 
parasitical weeds, hampers the growth of a new plant. He was, 
therefore, in a position to appreciate their humanizing elements, 
without feeling a taste of the miasma which they exhale, 
where they exist in a stage of social decrepitude. He, accord- 
ingly, took the mediaeval gauge of the spiritual, as the actual 
framework of the phenomenal world, and loved to hang his 
pictures in it. Its representations of the invisible surround 
and interfuse his poetic creations, not in any narrow doctrinal, 
but in a wide aesthetic, sense. For the boundless savannahs of 
America, her wide-rolling rivers, which at their mouth spout forth, 
as well as drink in, a sea, if they did not nourish in his soul any 
visions of exquisite beauty, extended her poet's mental horizon and 
prevented him from entertaining contracted views of anything. 



362 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

The " Golden Legend," one of Longfellow's lengthiest pieces, 
is, perhaps, one of the least satisfactory. The individual scenes 
are good ; some of the fancies exquisite. But the absence of 
anything like a well-developed plot completely strips it of 
interest. The love of Elsie for Prince Henry is dealt with 
as a mere feeling of religious duty. It is, also, in the highest 
degree unnatural that a prince, under the direct influence of the 
devil, should, with the devil himself, behave like an upright 
gentleman. But Longfellow, doubtless, felt the natural develop- 
ment of the story would have led him to trench on ground 
already occupied by " Faust ;" and he preferred keeping the 
morale intact, to provoking a comparison in which he must have 
felt his great inferiority. The prince and his lover, with Mephis- 
tophiles, move through a succession of ill-connected scenes, 
and finally wind up with a marriage, which, as we never look 
forward to as a result, excites no feeling except astonishment. 
Marriages without courtship are as tame as love without 
passion ; and both, in the hands of a greater master of song 
than Longfellow, would have failed to attract admiration. The 
" Golden Legend," then, as a work of art, excites little feeling 
beyond regret that a piece which contains so many beautiful 
passages, which is so far removed from our spasmodic literature 
by the quiet serenity poured like a flood of mild sunshine 
through its pages, should have been so much wanting in the 
sense of unity and completeness. 

The " Spanish Student," which is the most artistic of Long- 
fellow's productions, will always excite and repay attention. 
The dialogue is easy, the situations natural, the sparkling 
ebullitions of fancy incessant ; yet this drama lacks deeply- 
embodied passion, subjective elaboration of character, and an 
air of substantial reality. We also feel that the plot was 
capable of being turned to greater account. Bartolome's 
character is only half developed, and his sudden fall at the end 
gives a sketchy and unfinished appearance to the piece. It 
adds much, however, to Longfellow's reputation that so pleasing 



■ 



POETS OF THE AFFECTIONS. 363 

a drama, one uniting so many perfections, should have come 
from his hands. The nineteenth- century poets have not evinced 
much dramatic vigour, and Longfellow's performance, in the 
melodramatic sphere, shines forth with the more lustre, from 
the flatness of the corresponding efforts which have emanated 
from his contemporaries. 

" Evangeline," which is deservedly one of the most popular 
poems of the age, manifests deep pathetic force, wonderful 
power of scene painting, with a perfect adherence to nature, in 
the development of character, and the manipulation of incident. 
The tale is simple ; but there is an epic completeness about it 
which belongs to few of Longfellow's productions. As a story, 
illustrative of the gigantic force of affection amidst the trials to 
which it is subjected in this world, the poem is greater than 
"Enoch Arden." For Longfellow's materials are fewer, and 
turned to greater account. The pity and emotional sympathy 
it excites is broader and more profound. The, poem is also full 
of spiritual radiance. The characters, as well as the scenes 
through which they move, are interfused with light, which 
springs from a sphere beyond this world of ours. Evangeline 
herself blends the purity of the sweetest of Raphael's Madon- 
nas, with the fervour and enduring love of the most tender of 
Correggio's Magdalenes. Earthly affection in her is radiated 
with all the splendours of divine love. The pursuit of a human 
object intensifies the angelic qualities of her nature. It is a 
natural sequel to such a story that 'Evangeline does not recover 
Gabriel until about to wing his flight to the skies. Her love, 
then, for Gabriel becomes identified with her longing for 
heaven itself. "Evangeline" may, therefore, be regarded a^ 
the apotheosis of human affection. As such, it contains a high 
moral lesson, and becomes the medium of a deep philosophy. 
Human nature, from what it contains of the God-like, must 
always lift us above the perishable. The virgin instincts of the 
soul defy the revolutions of space and time. Human love, 
instead of being an obstacle, may become the best preparatory 



364 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

school for divine love, into which it may become absorbed, 
as a river, by the ocean. Longfellow's " Evangeline " ennobles, 
in the sphere of suffering, the feminine nature, quite as much 
as Dante's "Beatrice" in that of enjoyment. If it be of a 
lower order of poetic creation, it is all the more likely to be 
more generally appreciated, and therefore to become a more 
practical instrument in the elevation of humanity. 

To this catholic picture of French rusticity, Longfellow has 
given us a contrast in the courtship of the Puritan Miles 
Standish ; but by no means with the same power. The tale is 
imperfect. The appearance of the hero at the wedding of 
Priscilla, after the rumour of his death, is left unexplained ; as 
also the escape of the village from the impending incursion of 
the Indians, after the inhabitants had been fluttered by the news, 
like the occupants of an unroofed and hawk-threatened dovecot. 
There is also no suffering to harrow up our sympathies. The 
successful lover does not interest us much • for he displays no 
heroism, and his bride only presents a pleasing picture of 
feminine constancy and magnanimity, upon which the poet 
longs so much to dwell. Puritanism rather contracts the 
feminine nature, but develops that of the man. Hence the 
character of Priscilla is only subsidiary in the piece to that of 
Miles Standish, who lacks, however, the stern and relentless 
nature of the type to which he belongs. The piece is full of 
graphic pictures. But the emotions are not touched. It can 
be readily seen that the poet's heart was not in his work. With 
Puritanism, Longfellow had little genial sympathy. He, there- 
fore, did not ring out of his subject that rich music it would 
otherwise have yielded up at his bidding. 

The rest of Longfellow's pieces, with the exception of 
" Hiawatha," are either short pieces or collections of such, under 
a common name. But many of these are of uncommon beauty, 
and have long since become heirlooms of the language. The 
"Norman Baron," the "Quadroon," and the "Village Blacksmith," 
each types of opposite elements of being, are thrown off by him 



POETS OF THE AFFECTIONS. 365 

with the hand of a master. His ballads, if they have not the 
elegance of Southey, exhibit far more pictorial power and 
deeper spirituality. With profound Christian feeling and an 
exquisite spirit of playfulness, he unites in these compositions 
the subtle essence of the German philosophy. Indeed, in this 
respect, Longfellow may be regarded as the Areopagiteof poetry. 
For what Dionysius did for doctrinal Christianity, the poet has 
accomplished for its moral and artistic spirit. By investing 
these influences with the air of a scientific spirituality, reared on 
a rational basis, he has increased their strength and enlarged 
their comprehensiveness. The union of two such potent 
spiritualities could not be effected without imparting a sense of 
freshness to the development of the poet's thought, if it did not 
enrich his mind with new ideas. It is by no means the least 
of Longfellow's merits that he combines the beautiful visions of 
Uhland with the devotional fervour of Montgomery, the mild 
wisdom of Heber with the deep spirituality of Muller. It is 
this combination which has stamped such an ineffaceable charm 
on Longfellow's miscellaneous poetry. 

After Tennyson, Longfellow has been the most popular poet 
of the day. And, though his later productions have not sup- 
ported his past reputation, he still maintains that distinction. 
There even are not wanting people who prefer him to the 
Laureate. He has certainly written a melodrama and a bucolic 
idyll equal to, if not above, anything of the same sort that 
Tennyson has, or probably could, accomplish. He has written 
many minor pieces which can hardly be rivaled for the 
combination of exquisite grace and fancy which they exhibit. 
But here Longfellow's superiority ends. Had Tennyson not 
written the " Idylls" or the "In Memoriam," his inferiority to 
his contemporary would have been manifest. But the power 
Tennyson displays, in these superior walks of his art, places him 
above any living contemporary. Longfellow's range is purely 
objective. He never attempts elegy, and if he did would pro- 
bably fail in it. In the elements necessary for the execution 



mm 



366 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

of a heroic poem, Longfellow is equally wanting. He lacks 
the power of depicting deep passion, or robing purely imaginary 
subjects with ideal grace and splendour. All his characters 
are of the earth, though his heroines invariably reflect in their 
mien the hues of heaven. Taking, therefore, Longfellow's 
excellencies in conjunction with his defects, considering his 
pictorial power, his command of the emotional sympathies, his 
sparkling fancy, his comprehensive catholic spirit, the air of 
novelty he has imparted to mediaeval ideas, together with his 
lack of the imaginative element and of architectonic skill, I 
think the ends of poetic justice will be served in placing him in 
the inner circle of the first group of third-class poets. Nor need 
Longfellow feel, because he has not the genius of a Shelley or a 
Milton, that his genius is not likely to be as profitable to man- 
kind. Poets of the first or second-class order generally stir the 
mind's secret springs too profoundly to be of service to them in 
a practical point of view. They exalt the imagination by scenes 
of ideal beauty never likely to be realized, and excite the mind 
to unprofitable yearning for the unattainable. The passions by 
them are roused from their depths, and the brain fevered into 
false creation. The intellectual horizon is extended too often 
at the expense of the moral element. But by poets of the third 
order the mental forces are seldom thrown out of their sym- 
metrical relationship. Among them are to be found the prac- 
tical instructors of mankind. They enlighten the judgment, 
while they warm the heart. By them the elements of human 
nature are not disturbed by any spiritual electricity from that 
natural equipoise which springs from their healthy development. 
They ripen the intellect and the moral sense simultaneously. 
They generally keep the passions within the restraints of the 
reason. By them the domestic virtues are cherished, and 
morality robed in the garb of a sparkling fancy and a sportive 
disposition. They habituate us to derive lessons from nature at 
every step. They train the aesthetic sense within us to extract 



POETS OF THE AFFECTIONS. 367 

beauty from commonplace objects, hope from gloom, and sun- 
shine from sorrow. They ripen our affections until they exhale 
an aroma, which sweetens the atmosphere of life. Among such 
teachers, it ought to form a subject of congratulation to Long- 
fellow, that he will ever hold a foremost place. 



368 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

REALISTIC SCHOOL. 

IT is rarely, when clergymen venture into the regions of the 
Muses, that they cut a very conspicuous figure there. I only 
know of two, who, as poets, have left behind them a brilliant 
reputation, and their triumphs were achieved in defiance of 
the cloth which they wore. While Herrick and Churchill 
wrote their best pieces, they lived in direct hostility with their 
professional duties. It would seem that the daughters of 
memory cherish some secret antipathy to theological pursuits, 
or at least they have no feelings of sympathy with those who, 

To wander round the Muse's sacred hill, 
Let the salvation of mankind stand still.* 

We all know that Young did not get on very well with them, 
even when he moralized his song ; and Bowles, in the list ot 
those who have acquired fame during the present century, is, per- 
haps, the least entitled to it. Home, who was turned out of the 
Presbytery for writing dramas, occupies a still lower position. 
Crabbe, though a poet of far more respectable pretensions, 
still labours under the disadvantages of his profession. Had 
he or Young been trained divines, it is probable what little 
poetical capacity either possessed would have been squeezed 

* Churchill's Satire on Bishop Warburton. 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 369 

out of them. But both entered the Church in mature 
age. They brought into the ministry a full knowledge of the 
world, a practical acquaintance with the miseries of life and 
vicissitudes of fortune. This experience was the grand store- 
house of Young's and Crabbe's muse. But they brought to 
the manipulation of the raw material the contracted views of 
their new profession. Human life was painted in all its shiver- 
ing nakedness. The world outside the Church was the vestibule 
of hell. The responsibilities of the wealthy made life burden- 
some, the labours of the poor made life miserable. That spirit 
of Greek joyousness which casts such broad sunshine over 
Helicon, hardly illumines a single line they have written. The 
sense of beauty suffers in them a complete eclipse. There 
is no outlet from the calamities of existence except spare 
living, a grave demeanour, reading one's Bible, and keeping a 
clear look-out against the evils which are always impending 
over us. The world is a sort of penitentiary, and they con- 
duct, us into its wards, with black staves, in crape bands, with 
the starch solemnity of decorum, as if they were ushering us 
into a house of mourning, and nature had no feeling but sorrow. 
But Crabbe, in addition to the gloom imparted by his pro- 
fessional bias, allowed his early miseries to impart a peculiar 
hypochondriac tone to his poetry. The feelings he excites are 
mentally depressing. He is a mere anatomist of moral 
diseases. We go through his poems as we would through a 
lazar-house or hospital. The characters are drawn to the life. 
But each is the subject of a moral diagnosis. His early prac- 
tice as a village doctor would seem to have inured his mind to 
the iEsculapian habit of probing moral diseases to their root. 
We admit the truth of the picture, but feel that, the poet has 
drawn his subjects from the darkest side of human life. Crabbe 
has been called the Hogarth of poets. But this is hardly cor- 
rect, for he shuns licentious revels. He does not picture vice 
in the acme of enjoyment, but in the agonies of its fall. He 
surrounds himself with nothing but miseries, and never seems 

24 



37o ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

so happy as when he is recounting the griefs of his neighbours. 
The poet has no philosophical opinions or aesthetic views of 
any kind. The area of his mind might be covered by the 
village catechism. It is owing to this lack of comprehensive- 
ness, no less than to the sombre nature of his muse, that 
Crabbe has long since fallen from the high place he once held 
among his contemporaries. 

It is, I suppose, in consequence of this contracted range of 

his thoughts, that Crabbe does not flourish in abstract themes, 

but only in painting objective individualities. When he 

generalizes, he becomes trite and heavy. But to his portraits he 

imparts the finished touches and the marvellous shades of 

Rembrandt. His "Library" and "Newspaper" are two of 

his most general, and two of his worst, poems. His " Parish 

Register " is the most individual, and therefore the best of his 

productions. He even seems incompetent to deal with specific 

facts, unless such as are actually floating before his eyes. For 

nearly all his pictures are the result of visual observation. 

Perhaps, there is no instance of any other poet, who has risen to 

greatness, with so contracted a sphere for his muse. Nearly all 

his poems are so many different photographs of the same subject. 

His "Parish Register" is only a prolongation of his "Village." 

His " Borough " is a still further expansion of the same subject. 

They both consist of masterly analyses of character and 

delineations of social life, in its most prosaic and repulsive 

aspects. In the "Tales of the Hall," Crabbe is much more 

discursive ; but they are all only so many episodes of provincial 

life. And even here, his lympathic constitution predominates. 

There is a sickly air of melancholy, and sombre tinge cf 

cloistered morality over all his narratives. He seems, even 

upon amatory subjects, to have felt that his whole strength lay 

in subduing the soul by pity. The purifying tendencies of this 

feeling, so present to the Greek mind, doubtless led him to 

think that, in giving his poems this turn, he was employing the 

Muses as the moral regenerators of mankind. 






REALISTIC SCHOOL. 371 

In vivid sketches of individual suffering, drawn from the 
humbler ranks of life, and in exciting sympathy for such 
suffering among a class too brazened by affluence and custom 
to be impressed by the sight of it, Crabbe appears to have 
found his peculiar mission. Out of such materials he contrives 
to extract more genuine feeling than any other poet. Words- 
worth, who closely followed him in this line, certainly did not 
improve upon his master. The descriptions of Crabbe are 
more terse, the portraits more life-like, his language more 
vigorous, his details more striking, and the thorn of sorrow 
rankles deeper in the heart, when barbed by a man who had 
himself experienced the miseries which he conveys. In the fol- 
lowing description of the heroine of a milliner's shop, as in most 
of his other portraits, the poet seems not to have been drawing 
from his imagination so much as sketching from real life : — 

And who that poor, consumptive, wither'd thing, 
Who strains her slender throat and strives to sing ? 
Panting for breath, and forced her voice to drop, 
And far unlike the inmate of the shop, 
Where she, in youth and health, alert and gay, . 
Laugh'd off at night the labours of the day ; 
With novels, verses, fancy's fertile powers 
And sister-converse pass'd the evening hours ; 
But Cynthia's soul was soft, her wishes strong, 
Her judgment weak, and her conclusions wrong : 
The morning call and counter were her dread, 
And her contempt the needle and the thread : 
But when she read some gentle Juliet's part, 
Her woe, her wish, she had it all by heart. 

At length the hero of the boards drew nigh, 
Who spake of love till sigh re-echoed sigh ; 
He told in honey'd words his deathless flame, 
And she his own by tender words became ; 
Nor ring nor license needed souls so fond, 
Alfonso's passion was his Cynthia's bond : 
And thus the simple girl, to shame betrayed, 
Sinks to the grave forsaken and dismayed.* 

* " The Borough Players," Letter xii. 



372 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS, 

Here the poet produces his results by simply adhering to 
nature. There is no exaggeration of any kind, no apparent 
struggle to produce effect. The " Story of Phoebe Dawson "* 
is still more effective than that of the " Musical Heroine," and 
the description of the "Miller's Daughter"! is more vigorous 
than either. " Ruth " % and " Ellen Orford "§ belong to the 
same gallery of portraits'; yet there is a particularity about them 
which makes them as individual as the rest. The " History of 
Thomas, the Consumptive Sailor Boy," who comes back from 
Greenland to die in the arms of Sally, is, as far as the materials 
of the tale go, trite enough. But in the hands of Crabbe it is 
invested with more plaintive tenderness than any other similar 
story in our language. Throughout all this class of subjects, 
Crabbe shows himself an easy master of those graphic traits and 
salient touches which make the individual character walk out, 
as it were, from the framework of the narrative ; and in using 
such materials for evoking sympathy he rules supreme. But 
these qualities alone would not place a man very high in the 
roll of British poets, and had it not been for adventitious 
circumstances, this poet would never have occupied that 
position in the eyes of his competitors. 

Crabbe was singularly fortunate during his life, in reuniting 
in his favour the suffrages of the two dispensers of poetical re- 
putation, — Gifford and Jeffrey, who vied with each other in 
chanting his praises and descanting on his merits. There has 
been no such union of rival political factions, in setting a poet 
upon a pedestal, since the days of Addison. Crabbe owed 
this success not less to the anti-democratic tendencies of his 
muse than to the solid advantages which the patronage of 
Burke conferred upon him. It certainly is another proof of 
the prescient sagacity of Burke's penetrating mind, that when no 
editor would receive Crabbe's wares, when all the booksellers 

* "Parish Register," Marriages. t Ibid, Baptisms. 

" Tales of the Hall," b. v. § " The Borough," Letter 22. 



■ 1-1 ' -■ 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 373 

to a man repudiated his pretensions, when every door was shut 
against him, Burke recognized his merit, and received the 
poet into his family, until some provision could enable him to 
woo the muses without experiencing the fate of an Otway or a 
Savage. Such was the expansiveness of that great man's heart, 
that to know Burke was to know the large circle of his acquaint- 
ance. By him he was introduced to Johnson, and found him- 
self at the easel of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Thenceforth he shot 
up like a rocket into the heaven of renown. Booksellers com- 
peted for the honour of publishing what a few years before they 
had scornfully rejected. Fox soothed the hours of sickness by 
turning over the leaves Of the " Parish Register," where he read ' 
of miseries deeper than his own. Even the tough heart of 
Thurlow was taught, by the same work, to melt at the sight of 
others' woe. He gave the poet a benefice. Sir Walter Scott 
re-echoed the general acclamation. Even the youthful Byron 
caught the infection so deeply as to place him in the first rank 
of existing poets : 

This fact in Virtue's name let Crabbe attest ; 
Though Nature's sternest painter, yet the best.* 

But this general eulogy was too exalted to be sustained. In 
the next generation Crabbe rapidly declined in favour, and 
now he is as virtually laid on the shelf as Rogers or Southey 
himself. But a calm and dispassionate criticism will equally 
learn to reduce factitious renown to its true value, while it 
rescues the poet's memory from the injustice of neglect. 

No poet in our literature carved out for himself a more 
special province than Crabbe, and adhered to it with more 
fidelity. This, perhaps, is one of the best proofs of his original 
genius. While adhering to the old poetical establishment with 
respect to his style, with respect to his matter, he resolved to 

* "I consider," writes Byron in 1816, "Crabbe and Coleridge as the 
first of these times in point of power and genius. " 



374 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

follow nature, to discard the hackneyed poetical commonplaces, 
— to sing of nothing but the natural results of his own experience. 
Life must be painted as it actually is, and not as it is depicted 
by a too heated imagination. As his predecessors revelled 
with buskined nymphs and swains in Idsean valleys or in Olym- 
pian groves, he reproduced the outcasts of cellars, the inmates 
of almshouses, and the victims of depravity, wrestling with 
misery in the squalid haunts of impoverished towns. No sub- 
ject was too low for his muse. Every rank and grade of life 
was ransacked to afford him instances of the miseries and 
the vices of the class from which he sprung. But these are 
treated in the elaborate style which the Queen Anne poets ap- 
plied to a far different kind of subjects. Hence, he has been 
called Pope in worsted stockings. But this is hardly fair to 
either poet, for both have distinct peculiarities, which keep 
them as wide apart as any two poets in our literature. If 
Crabbe has none of the passion, or sublimity, or recondite 
thought, or ingenious fancy, he has few of the artificial airs 
of his master. He rarely substitutes words for thoughts. If 
his ' ' language is polished, it is always terse, manly, unos- 
tentatious, — always revealing the matter, never itself. 
He never attempts to hide prosaic conceptions behind bril- 
liant antitheses. But we rarely get more than the simple 
picture of the object which Crabbe presents to us, or if the 
poet helps us to anything out of his own mind, it simply con- 
sists of wise saws of prudence, moral hints, and religious ad- 
monitions. In this respect he is the most objective poet in 
any literature. 

I must, therefore, set down Crabbe as wanting in all the 
qualities of first-class poetry. Ideality, passion, constructiveness, 
invention upon any imposing scale, brilliant fancy, — he has 
none of these : hence, he rarely attempts any other form 
of verse except the simple idyll, or any other metre than the 
pentameter. 1^ In extracting pathos out of scenes mainly 
drawn from humble life, he is unrivaled. Here his strength 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 375 

lay. He is also hardly less successful in graphic delineation 
of the provincial life with which he was familiar. Crabbe 
from a boy was a keen observer of, everything which passed 
under his notice. He has drawn his own portrait in this 
respect in the adventures of Richard,* the poor lad who 
daily brought to his widowed mother's home the results of 
his rambles through the neighbouring fishing village, and also 
contrived, from the quay and the street, from the mechanic's 
shop and the smuggler's cave, from the fisher's hut and the 
tavern fireside, from the screaming gulls and the clashing waves, 
to extract themes for his muse and principles for his guidance, 
in after life. In reproducing these varied experiences, and 
in surrounding them with details which imparted to them life 
and freshness, no poet could have been more successful than 
Crabbe ; but here his triumph ends. In describing the lower 
phases of the actual, he distances all his competitors. But when 
he comes to warmth of colouring, to passionate imagination, 
to sublime philosophic invention; in fine, to any of those 
qualities which invest the actual with the ideal, here Crabbe 
touches ground. It is not that he fails in any of these great 
qualities, so much as he never attempts to exhibit them. 
Hence Crabbe's stories can never occupy the top rank of 
idyllic literature, nor entitle their author to more than a 
respectable place in the middle group of our third-class 
poets. 

* "Tales of the Hall," b. iv. 



376 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



^toinxixxiQ. 



BROWNING is one of those writers who has achieved 
success by a series of failures. Nothing could hardly 
have been more unpromising than his first performances. His 
plays could neither be tolerated on the stage, nor in the closet. 
His narrative poetry was undecypherable. His lyrics set teeth 
on edge as effectually as if the sound had forced its jagged way 
through pipes of scrannel straw. The public stopped its ears. 
But the poet, doubtless, feeling there was a chink of good 
metal in his ore, laboured at the literary anvil, until sparks 
began to gleam, and a glow was struck out which created for 
him an audience. Twenty years ago Browning was unendu- 
rable. Now, it would be hardly too much to say that his 
popularity as a poet is alone overshadowed by the wider renown 
of Tennyson. For his later poems have reflected back some 
portion of their glitter on his earlier pieces, and has raised 
them, as it were, to be joint partners in their success, like 
the later offshoots of a family who have rescued the elder 
branches from the obscurity entailed by their individual 
demerits. This is the unjust incidence of a law which is 
fair in its general application. A poet who, like Scott, writes 
his best things first, whatever may be the amount of his early 
fame, generally fails to steep in its sunshine his later produc- 
tions, if these are much below the standard of his previous 
efforts. But if the worst come first, the majority of readers 
are too apt to think they have been asleep, and eagerly seize 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 377 

upon all that they had shut their eyes to before, as food for 
an intellectual banquet. 

Genius, of course, is erratic. It is hazardous to formulate 
its growth under any general law. But this much may be said, 
at all events, that the world has never seen an example of first- 
class poetic genius commencing early and labouring all through 
that long space of life which the Romans included within the 
period of youth, without producing anything which may be called 
great, and then, while the physical powers are on the wane, 
achieving distinction by works of the highest order of merit. 
Now, Browning's poetic capacities are just of that class from 
which we would expect long-enduring struggle, terminating in 
ever-widening gleams of success, achieved not by any com- 
manding powers of genius, but by deep observation upon 
men and their ways, by a happy Carlyleism of expression, and a 
laboured persistence at the file, so as to pack the greatest 
amount of thought in the briefest compass of words. He has 
little pathos. His imagination is at zero. He has no deep 
well of sensibility springing up in himself. His powers are all 
fed and called into action by external objects, to which he 
brings to bear shrewd good sense and deep reflection, sharpened 
by a facetiousness which imparts to his thoughts an Attic 
flavour. But if we look for the lofty elements of poetry in 
Browning, that is, for those ingredients which constitute ideality, 
passion, sympathy, and a grand inventive genius, we shall 
assuredly look in vain. Browning is too practical, cleaves too 
much to the outside world to deal in such things. We might 
as well ask for civet perfume from our fishmonger, or Indian 
silks at a butcher's shop. 

^The earlier efforts of Browning's muse were directed to 
the embodiment of the lives of theorists who had grown up 
under the influence of a mad craving for knowledge, love, and 
power. In " Paracelsus," we have the Swiss empiric, tracked 
through the strange divagations of his career, and dramatically 
avouching his belief in the extravagant professions with which 



378 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

he astounded the universities of Europe. But even here, the 
unimaginative nature i of the poet is apparent ; for, instead of 
surrounding his hero with strange adventures, or introducing 
him to demons exorcised to yield up the secret of other worlds, 
Browning treats his subject entirely from a psychological point 
of view, and gives us simply the lofty aspirations of the hero 
himself, modified by no results unless the failure of his efforts. 
We view him in Geneva, as well as in Constantinople and 
Rome, harnessed simply to the common gear of every-day life ; 
and the reader, after wading through this protracted life-drama 
of four parts, derives no glimpse beyond the boundary of 
actual existence. He is, however, refreshed by draughts of in- 
spiration which allure him onward through these barren regions, 
though the springs are as rare as gushes of water from the rocks 
of an African wilderness. When Paracelsus is remonstrated 
with for leaving all the pleasures of home, in pursuit of wild 
devices and airy imaginings, he replies > — 

What should I 
Do, kept among you all ? * * * * * 

Be sure that God 
Ne'er dooms to waste the strength He deigns to impart. 
Ask the gier-eagle why she stoops at once 
Into the vast and unexplored abyss, 
What full-grown power informs her from the first 
Why she not marvels, strenuously beating 
The silent boundless regions of the sky ! 

* * * * * * I go to prove my soul ; 
I see my way, as birds their trackless way. 
1 shall arrive ! What time, what circuit first, 
I ask not : but, unless God send his hail, 
Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow, 
In some time, His good time, I shall arrive : 
He guides me and the bird.* 

These flights, however, are at the expense of history; for 
Paracelsus was too reckless a boaster to talk philosophy, and 

* Sc. i. 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 379 

one of his -proper names — Bombastus — survives to designate 
the rant with wjiich he used to drench his contemporaries. 
But Browning makes him, after the manner of Buckle, formulate 
the law of progress : — 

'Tis in the advance of individual minds 

That the slow crowd should ground their expectation 

Eventually to follow ; as the sea 

Waits ages in its bed, till some one wave 

Out of the multitudinous mass, extends 

The empire of the whole, some feet, perhaps, 

Over the strip of sand which would confine 

Its fellows so long time. Thenceforth the rest, 

Even to the meanest, hurry in at once, 

And so much is clear gained.* 

At Constantinople he falls in with Aprile, an Italian poet, as 
madly in quest of love as Paracelsus is after knowledge, his 
acquaintance with whose frenzy almost awakens him from his 
own: — 

Love me henceforth, Aprile, while I learn 
To love ; and, merciful God, forgive us both ! 
We wake at length from weary dreams, but both 
Have slept in fairyland : tho' dark and drear 
Appears the world before us, we no less 
Wake with our wrists and ankles jewelled still. 
I, too, have sought to know, as thou to love, 
Excluding love as thou refusedst knowledge. 
Still thou hast beauty and I power. We wake : 
What penance canst devise for both of us ?f- 

Aprile, however, dies, when only his true worth reveals itself to 
Paracelsus : — 

'Tis only when they spring to Heaven that angels 

Reveal themselves to you : they sit all day 

Beside you, and lie down at night by you, 

Who care not for their presence ; — muse or sleep, — 

And all at once they leave you, and you know them.* 

* Sc. iii. t Sc. ii. t Sc. v. 



380 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

The hero at last is brought to recognise the value of his fellow- 
creatures, whose shortcomings a too haughty disposition had led 
him to despise : — 

In my own heart, love had not been made wise 
To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind, 
To know even hate is but a mask of love's, 
To see a good in evil, and a hope 
In ill- success. To sympathize, be proud 
Of their half reasons, faint aspirings, dim 
Struggles for half truths, their poor fallacies, 
Their prejudices, fears and cares and doubts, 
"Which all touch upon nobleness, despite 
Their error, all tend upwardly, though weak, 
Like plants in mines which never saw the sun, 
But dream of him, and guess where he may be, 
And do their best to climb and get to him: — 
All this I knew and failed.* 

He does not expire, however, without a presentiment that his 
name one day will be in the ascendant : — 

If I stoop 
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, 
It is but for a time ; I press God's lamp 
Close to my heart ; it's splendour, soon or late, 
Will pierce the gloom. I shall emerge one day ! 
You understand me ? f 

The lesson taught by Paracelsus is what some of us learn, 
like himself, too late : — 

Let men 
Regard me, and the poet dead long ago, 
Who once loved rashly ; and shape forth a third, 
And better-tempered spirit, warned by both.J 

But these beauties hardly repay the reader for the laborious 
effort of toiling through a performance in which there is no 
incident to amuse and little philosophy to instruct him, where the 

* Sc. v. f Sc. v. X Sc. v. 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 381 

attention constantly flags from want of sustained interest, and 
the characters excite no curiosity, their actions emerging out of 
preconceived pyschological theories rather than from the well- 
spring of the human heart. 

If " Paracelsus " awakened any expectation of poetic power 
from Browning, the hope must have been quickly extinguished 
by the appearance of " Sordello " some five years afterwards, a 
work which very few people have tried to get through, and out 
of the handful who have, not one has arrived at the singular 
felicity of decyphering its meaning. The intention of Browning 
was to reveal the growth of a poet's mind in the twelfth century, 
upon Lombard soil, embodying in its formation all the artistic 
influences rife at the period, along with the effects of those 
stormy vicissitudes which the Italian republics of the north 
underwent in upholding their liberties, at one time against the 
attacks of the Emperor, at another against the encroachments 
of the Pope. To trace the influence of new ideas upon national 
or individual character, especially among such a wild race as 
these Lombard people, not long caught in the Christian net, and 
displaying in their public monuments as well as in their riotous 
acts, all the savage instincts of their pagan ancestors, was indeed 
a task worthy of a great poet. The history of the period, too, 
crammed full of romance, might have furnished the writer with 
many an episode full of love and daring exploit, to arouse the 
most lagging attention, or satisfy the most gluttonous appetite 
for sensational novelty. But Browning hit upon a mine, which 
he could not strike his shaft into, and the riches of which he 
consequently failed to appreciate. He does not appear to have 
understood that these Lombardic people were, in the twelfth 
century, in a mere transition state, with a Christian creed united 
to pagan manners • nor comprehended the necessity of fitting 
the mind of his hero into the corresponding state of things. 
Indeed, so far as I can make out, "Sordello" is much more the 
offspring of the nineteenth century than of the splendid savagery 
which characterized the people among whom his destiny was 



382 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

intended to have been moulded. He reveals the features of a 
refined artist and gentleman growing up among a set of half- 
civilized barbarians who were constantly knocking each other 
on the head, when they stood in one other's way, and who 
seldom patronized art unless as a medium of transmitting their 
crimes to posterity. This poem, therefore, by the generality of 
readers, is fairly given up as a puzzle which is scarcely worth the 
trouble to solve. Between incongruity and unmeaningness there 
is hardly an inch of ground on which the critic can plant the sole 
of his foot. 

The story of Sordello is told in six books ; the first three 
record his experience as an egoist, comprising the musings of the 
early part of his life in the castle of Goito, where he was brought 
up in ignorance of his hereditary claims to the Ghibelline chief- 
dom, and in lone communings with Nature.. The last three are 
taken up with Sordello's experience as an altruist, in the course 
of which he attempts to conciliate the leaders of the Ghibellines 
with those of the Guelfs, whom he imagines to have right on 
their side, and to rule over the rival factions by the gifts of an 
Apollo-kingship or a sort of natural divine right, which the 
Italians, it is supposed, on account of their love for the arts, 
ought to be the first to yield submission to. A lady, of 
course, figures in the story, with the appropriate name of 
Palma, of high lineage, who ushers Sordello from his place of 
obscurity into the presence of the great world. Sordello and 
Palma entertain a mutual passion for each other, which is 
subject to the usual ordeals of rival claimants for the lady's 
hand; but, before the lovers can be united, Sordello dies, just 
having discovered that his aspirations to the poet kingship were 
supported by the more substantial claims of hereditary descent. 
It would hardly be thought that a theme of this simple charac- 
ter needed such complex treatment as to render it unintelligible 
to the ordinary reader. But the poet opens the piece with his 
hero's end, and sets out, therefore, by obliging us to read history 
backwards. The reader, however, is no sooner bent upon this task 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 383 

than he finds himself transferred to the commencement of the 
story, which he plods through very much with the feelings of one 
introduced into a sphere where neither latitude, or chronology, 
or syntax have any visible recognition whatever. The mere 
sensuous intuitions of space and time may, doubtless, have their 
effect upon the outer development of a poet's life. But 
Browning's task was to account for the growth of his hero's 
mind, with whose innate strength they have very little to do. 
He, therefore, thought himself at liberty to make 

Succeeding times shake hands with later, 
And that, which was before, come after, 

in his efforts to penetrate into the roots of mental phenomena, and 
reveal the inner shapings of a poet's powers. Hence he starts 
his story just before Sordello's death-scene, to come round to the 
same point again ; just as in the recital of Sordello's experience 
as an egoist and altruist, Browning leaves his hero at the. close 
of each circle very much in the same plight as he found him at 
setting out. Indeed, so bent is Browning upon revealing the 
action of pyschological laws in the formation of a poet's charac- 
ter, that towards the close of his story he regales us with some 
twelve pages of his own individual experience of poetic develop- 
ment, in utter defiance of historical unity or of any laws ol 
grammatical construction which govern the speech of men. 

It is this love of introspective analysis, this predominance of 
the mental over the sensuous, of the rational over the emotional 
nature in Browning, which has paralysed all his efforts to shine 
as a dramatist. He writes mostly as if his feelings had to work 
their way through the heavy folds of the intellect. His cha- 
racters seem formed to display the effect of some psychological 
law, rather than to trace the growth of passion in peculiar 
natures, under certain groups of circumstances. It is not that 
his personages never die of passion, or kill themselves in despair. 
These catastrophes happen with Browning as often as with other 
dramatists. The only difference is, that when they occur else- 



384 EST1MA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

where, there is always some explicit reason, some prelusive 
outburst of feeling, whereas Browning's characters have the trick 
of falling dead, or becoming delirious without evincing any 
emotion or premonitory symptoms whatever. In the " Blot of 
the 'Scutcheon," Lady Mildred, who is anxiously waiting in her 
chamber for the midnight visit of her lover, receives from her 
brother Thorold the news, that he, Thorold, has just slain him 
beneath her window, almost with the same sang-froid as if the 
speaker had announced truffles for supper : — 

Ah ! this speaks for you. 
You've murdered Henry Mertoun ! now proceed ! 
"What is it I must pardon ? This and all ? 
Well, I do pardon you ; — I think I do. 
Thorold, how very wretched you must be ! * 

Yet, after an hour of this imperturbable talk, Lady Mildred falls 
dead, and her too impetuous brother, who acts like a madman, 
but who is supposed to be the only person in the piece under 
the influence of reason, follows her example. In like manner, 
Anael, in the " Return of the Druses," falls dead without any 
presumable cause, just at the very moment she is wanted ; and 
Djabal, her lover, slips out of the world, after her, without any 
emotion, just as if death was only stripping off one's coat, and life 
could be resumed as easily as putting it on again. In " Luria," 
the Moor drinks poison, because he has first gained a victory 
which has saved Florence, and placed his enemies at his feet. 
And, to make the denouement more startlingly absurd, a group 
of people are introduced talking to the dead man, who goes 
through the agonies of a violent death as calmly as if he were 
going to sleep. Old King Victor, in the tragedy of that 
name, also "shuffles off this mortal coil" in the same easy fashion, 
just as his son is restoring the crown which the old man had 
come from Chambery to claim. In all these cases, Death steps 
in at an unseasonable juncture, to tell the actor he is wanted, 

* Act iii., sc. ii. 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 385 

and an unintelligible life is ended by an exit equally unintelli- 
gible. Now there may be something in all this beyond our 
powers of comprehension ; but it cannot be connected with the 
growth of passion, which constitutes the life-blood of the drama. 
It need hardly be stated, that action is the very soul of 
dramatic life. As the Greek term imports, a drama is some- 
thing to be performed, not a quality to be illustrated, or a set 
of speeches to be spoken. Sentiments must be subsidiary to 
acts, and never allowed to usurp their place. Without the pro- 
gressive development of human action — one group of facts 
evolving themselves out of another in natural sequence — there 
can be no such thing as dramatic representation at all. Each 
scene must keep the spectator in suspense, while it moves the 
action one step forward to the final result. But in most of 
Browning's plays, we get neither backward nor forward, but the 
action appears to oscillate about a certain fixed centre, that is, 
the metaphysical stand-point he is desirous to illustrate. Any- 
thing, therefore, like vulgar human interest is set at nought . 
Hence, action lags, and human incident is buried beneath 
interminable conversations, designed rather to display some 
peculiar theory of human nature, than to stimulate the fancy or 
to warm the heart. In " Luria," the stand-point appears to be 
heroic magnanimity. The Moor, after pendulating, through five 
acts, between destroying his enemies or saving the republic, 
winds up by destroying himself. In the " Return of the Druses," 
the design of which is to exhibit female disinterestedness, there 
is no real action till the closing scene, when the incidents of 
a contorted love and political rebellion are despatched in a 
few lines, which ought to have been spread over the body of the 
play. In " King Victor " we have hardly any incidents, certainly 
none capable of awakening the slightest interest, spun out 
into the form of a five act drama, seemingly for the sake of 
showing the influence of a masculine woman over an effeminate 
man. It is evident that plays constructed after this fashion 
can neither instruct nor amuse, and I am not, therefore, sur- 

25 



386 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

prised to find that the poet, some quarter of a century ago, 
came to Hamet Benengeli's resolution of laying down his pen 
and writing no more compositions of this kind for an unap- 
preciating public. 

Mr. Browning, however, being a man of ability, could execute 
nothing without manifesting some signs of vigour, and accord- 
ingly we find scattered up and down his dramas, though at rare 
intervals, passages of power. Thus, in the " Return of the 
Druses," Loys de Dreux expresses his love for Anael : — 

Your breathing passes through me, changes 
My blood to spirit, and my spirit to you, 
As heaven the sacrificer's wine to it : — * 

And in the same play Djabal very powerfully expresses his 
determination to slay the tyrant who had shown no mercy to 
his race : — 

The man must die, 

As thousands of our race have died thro' him . 

One blow, and I discharge his weary soul 

From the flesh that pollutes it ; — let him fill 

Straight some new expiatory form of earth, 

Or sea, the reptile, or some aery thing : — t 

And in the " Blot of the 'Scutcheon," the conventional world, 
so often shocked at the sequel of true love, is thus rebuked by 
Mertoun, — 

Die, Mildred ! leave 
Their honourable world to them, — for God 
We're good enough, tho' the world casts us out !+ 

And in the "Scene in a Balcony," Herbert expresses his 
passion with electric force, as all the love should be expressed 
which sheathes itself in the heart : — 

Give my love its way: 
A man can have but one life and one death, 
One heaven, one hell. Let me fulfil my fate : — 
Grant me my heaven now. Let me know you mine, 

* Act iii. f Actiii. + Act iii., sc. i. 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 387 

Prove you mine, write my name upon your brow ; 
Hold you, and have you, and then die away, 
If God please, with completion in my soul.* 

But these flashes of genius are momentary, and only serve to 
throw out into more startling prominence the desert waste of 
commonplace by which they are surrounded. 

"Colombe's Birthday" is the only one of Browning's plays 
which, I think, posterity will care about preserving, and that 
not so much for the stage as for the closet. The characters 
are more natural than in any other of his performances, and the 
plot, such as it is, begins to develop itself in the first act, and 
expands with steady progress till it culminates in the end. 
The language, too, is at once plastic and forcible, occasionally 
reminding us of the dramatists of the early Stuarts. Valence, 
a poor advocate of Clives, who believes that the Duchess 
Colombe is about to jilt him and barter her heart for pelf and 
power, thus expresses his indignation : — ■ 

Oh heaven ! this mockery "has been played too oft ! 

Once to surprise the angels, — twice, that Fiends 

Recording might be proud they chose not so — 

Thrice many thousand times, to teach the world 

All men should pause, misdoubt their strength, since men 

Could have such chance, yet fail so signally, 

— But ever, — ever — this farewell to heaven, 

Welcome to earth — this taking death for life, — 

This spurning love and kneeling to the world — 

Oh heaven ! it is too often and too old.+ 

But the great defect of the piece is the meagre conception of 
this Valence, who is represented as a provincial simpleton, and 
about the last person with whom a grand lady like Colombe 
could possibly fall in love. We miss also in the Duchess, not 
only the display of passion, but the steps which lead up to it ; 
we get occasionally the sentiment, but we lack the fire and the 
growth of love. The consequence is that the language, as in 

* First Part. f Act v. 



388 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

his other plays, seems pitched in the same monotonous key. 
Everything seems to be reached through the dry abstraction of 
the intellect rather than the glowing enthusiasm of the heart. 
Hence, going through one of Browning's plays is travelling 
through a champaign country, where there is no towering 
grandeur, no diversified peaks, or richly wooded slopes to re- 
lieve the eye, but where the traveller only meets with occasional 
patches of verdure cultivated on the same stagnant level. 
Where Browning's plays are not defective from lack of incident 
or progressive evolution of plot, they fail from unintelligibility 
of motive, or unnatural situation of character. In " Strafford," 
which is the most pretentious of his tragedies, the plot moves 
steadily forward, for this is supplied by history ; but the senti- 
ments belie nature, and these are supplied by the poet himself. 
Strafford was a character, the mainspring of whose motives was 
towering ambition. To seize upon the highest honours in the 
state, to clutch an earldom, he abandoned his party and risked 
his neck. But in the play he is represented as impelled along 
his daring course by his love for the king — 

Him with the mild voice and the mournful eyes. 

Of Pym we know very little. But it is hardly likely that the 
man who hunted Strafford to the scaffold, would be, as Browning 
represents him, bound to his victim by chivalrous friend- 
ship in his early manhood. The closing scene, in which the 
poet introduces both shaking hands, and looking forward to a 
renewal of their early affection in another world, is simply an 
outrage on propriety. Men who have been seeking each other's 
blood, just at the moment when the desires of one are about 
to be glutted with the head of his victim, are not so ready to 
rush into each other's arms and crave instant forgiveness. I 
do not know if Strafford was ever guilty of the unpardonable 
folly of making love. At least Browning does not think so, 
for the only expression of tenderness he has for the unswerving 
fidelity of Lady Carlisle, escapes him, by addressing her occa- 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 389 

sionally as Lucy. And the lady expresses her passion for her 
hero with equal frigidity by calling him "noble Strafford." Hence 
no feelings but those of weariness are awakened by the perform- 
ance. The buckram platitudes in which the speakers indulge 
even destroy those feelings of pity which the story of Strafford 
is calculated to awaken in the roughest minds. Read the 
facts as they are narrated in history, and we are moved to 
tears ; but read them in the pages of the dramatist, and we 
contemplate the tale with indifference. Even when Strafford's 
children are brought into his prison, we feel no sympathy, 
simply because the poet has not prepared us for it. The drama- 
tist, here, is in the situation of the actor. Before he can excite 
compassion in others he must feel it himself. And Browning, 
doubtless, thinks it unmanly to give unrestrained scope to his 
emotional nature. He has accordingly spoiled the materials 
for a very fine tragedy. " Strafford " for some short period, 
assisted by the superb presence of Macready, kept possession 
of the British stage, but when he withdrew his sustaining hand, 
the play soon slipped out of the public notice. 

Browning, notwithstanding his dramatic failures, is essenti- 
ally a realistic poet. His sphere lies in the reproduction of the 
actual. Out of the charmed circle of English life he rarely 
treads. Yet he is not a representative poet, in the broad 
sense of the term ; for his characters are too few to embrace 
any wide section of humanity, and too individual to become 
the embodiment of the class to which they belong. His 
sketches are too local and particular in their colouring to be 
accepted in any lofty sense of generalization. He sticks too 
closely to fact, to launch out into any views of speculation. 
He is in poetry what Bacon called himself in physics, the 
interpreter of nature, the only difference being that the objects 
to which the poet applies his plummet-line, are not stones and 
trees, but men and women. And men and women he 
produces in their fragmentary aspects, just as they are beating 
out their isolated lives, without any theories, which make 



390 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

the few, exponents of the destiny of the many. Hence Brown- 
ing does not dominate his age in any one feature. He does not 
even affect to charm it into other paths than those along 
which it seems driven by the blind impulse of necessity. His 
is not the task to leap Phaeton-like into the chariot of 
destiny, and guide the sphere of the earth nearer to the 
sun. He has no theories to propound, patchwork-fashion 
or otherwise. The enigma of life and death he does not 
attempt to meddle with. All Browning's aim is to stereotype 
some phase of actual life, to catch as it were some stirring 
incident, or some great character in the act of shaping its par- 
ticular ends, and mould them in his page, that they may stand 
out like the tablatures on a Greek frieze in startling prominence 
for ever. 

Decidedly the cleverest of these pieces is " Bishop Blou- 
gram's Apology," under which title the poet introduces Cardinal 
Wiseman justifying his own position, as the very best of all 
positions in the world for him, to one Gigadibs, a literary 
man, who affects to despise His Eminence as a mere charlatan 
playing a masked part. Gigadibs, being one of an influential class 
entertaining similar feelings, has been invited to dinner, in order 
to give the prelate an opportunity of reasoning him out of his 
false impressions, and thereby demolishing a host of opponents 
to his style and dignity. The bishop sets Gigadibs quite 
at his ease during dessert, just as a dentist places his victim in 
an easy chair, before he commences the extracting process ; nor 
does Gigadibs get off quite clear until every ante-Blougram 
prejudice has been plucked out of him by the roots. But this 
is done by a candid avowal of feelings and convictions by no 
means creditable to Blougram, who declares himself not an 
absolute believer, though as perfect a one as the age can afford, 
and who flatly admits he has clutched the foremost prize of the 
Church, because he saw the object was within his reach, and 
that this object gave him, in conjunction with the greatest ease 
and literary leisure, a station of great eminence in the eyes of 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 391 

the world. His guest, however, was a literary hack, with no 
claim to consideration whatever. For extinguish the con- 
tributor to Blackwood, and what was Gigadibs ? Nothing. But 
Blougram, while he wrote articles, in the Dublin Review, on 
Etrurian art and on the Roman catacombs, was a primate of the 
Church, on whom the tiara of the Papacy might fall ; styled the 
queen his cousin, and had dukes and duchesses kneeling to kiss 
his ring every day. Gigadibs would, to his dying hour, regard his 
invitation to Blougranr's table as one of the crowning honours 
of his life. Contrast such a position with the first Napoleon's 
or Shakespeare's, and, in a worldly point of view, both were con- 
temptible. All Napoleon's struggles, no sane man would endure 
for the miserable termination of an Austrian marriage, and the 
construction of a bran new empire, which was no sooner raised 
than tumbled down and buried the creator in its ruins. As for 
the poor bard of Avon, he was always glad to nestle under the 
protection of people who, had they been alive now, would have 
felt it an honour to have had Blougram 's acquaintance. 
Gigadibs, who does not deny the cogency of this reasoning, 
quietly hints his suspicions that Blougram cannot believe in all 
the theological nonsense he expresses, and that, in such a case, 
the interior conviction that he is a charlatan, merely playing a 
part, must interfere with that self-respect without which, for 
a conscientious man, there is little enjoyment in this world. 
He, Gigadibs, though socially insignificant, has a self-approving 
conscience to fall back upon, a feeling of candour underlying 
honest conviction, which gives him the reputation of manliness 
with his fellows, and keeps the whiteness of his own mind with- 
out a stain. The crowd frequently exclaim, " Blougram is an 
impostor ! " But nobody who knows Gigadibs believes that he 
is other than what he appears — an honest man. Blougram, 
however, parries this thrust very successfully, by showing 
Gigadibs his erroneous notions about faith. Absolute, undis- 
turbed belief in religious dogma in these scientific times is 
impossible, just as absolute scepticism, undisturbed by religious 



392 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

gleams, is impossible. Sceptics occasionally are devout, as 
believers have sometimes their moments of scepticism. Giga- 
dibs is invited to choose between a life of faith diversified by 
doubt, or a life of doubt diversified by faith. Blougram saw 
distinctly that the first alternative was the best thing for him, 
because it led to a bishopric ; whereas Gigadibs had closed with 
the latter, which leads to nothing. Herewith, Blougram uses an 
appropriate simile. Two passengers are introduced going a 
voyage. One takes furniture exactly suited to his cabin's size, 
and makes his journey as agreeable as possible; the other 
orders all kinds of movables, sumptuous and luxurious, without 
any consideration of the miserable six-feet-by-four berth in which 
he is to be located. The captain is peremptory in excluding 
lumber which there is no possible means of using, and the 
voyager is obliged to sail without any suitable provision at all. 
This is Gigadibs' position. In aiming at being a high-souled 
magnate he has spent his best years so far in vain. He would 
be great without stooping to the means by which greatness is 
won, or, in other words, he has not suited his furniture to the 
cabin size ; he has not employed those resources within his 
reach, as Blougram has done, to make external forces work for 
him, and so lift him into greatness. The consequence is, that 
while Blougram is an ecclesiastical potentate, whom kings would 
be proud to shelter, Gigadibs is living unnoticed in a garret, 
eking out a precarious existence by the patronage of the 
monthlies. The picture is, doubtless, overcharged. But to 
anyone acquainted with the real Blougram, who has had oppor- 
tunities of fathoming the latent motives of the man from his 
outward acts, and contrasting both with his public career, 
Browning's picture, combining in a masterly manner his subtle 
analytical spirit with his worldly aims and grasping pretensions, 
will always appear a familiar portrait, destined to become 
as historical as Raphael's "Julius," which shows the fiery 
temperament of Mars peering through the lineaments of 
the Christian monk. But this is hardly the triumph of poetry, 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 393 

so much as of metaphysical skill and acute observation of 
character. 

Browning has attempted to reproduce Andrea del Sarto 
and Fra Lippo de Lippi, but by no means with the same 
success as the portrait of the prelate, whom, I do not doubt, 
he often had the opportunity of meeting at Mr. Sloan's 
in Florence. The two great Catholic painters he could only 
know through " Vasari," and what remains of their art in the 
Tuscan convents and in the Pitti palace. He had, therefore, 
to work them out through the ideal, and this he has failed to 
seize. No Protestant artist can enter into the conceptions of 
Catholic painters, at least so far as to embody their feelings 
in dramatic soliloquy. Browning began life as an artist, and, 
doubtless, selected these subjects, because he thought his 
acquaintance with their art would enable him to introduce them 
to his readers with some degree of success. In the familiar 
intimacy with their lower life, in which the poet indulges, he 
misses the lofty conceptions of the two great Florentine painters 
— those naming ideals which tortured them in their beds, and 
rendered them deaf to the praises and slights of their neigh- 
bours. Andrea is represented as eulogising others at the ex- 
pense of himself, before his faithless wife, who has her gallant 
at the window, and who cannot, therefore, be supposed to be 
very much interested in the fact, that her husband succeeds 
because he never aims higher than his capacity, and that 
others fail because they have loftier ideals but lower powers of 
execution. Lippi is introduced prowling about the streets at 
night in quest of frail virginities, and coming in contact with 
the watch, to whom he narrates his history. By his own ac- 
count, he is a mere beast of burden for the monks, who will 
not allow him to paint anything but their own religious pictures, 
after their own peculiar models. He must paint flesh only that 
he may manifest the soul which animates it. There must be 
no voluptuousness, no portrayal of flesh as the mere embodi- 
ment of sensuous beauty. This being the thing the painter 



394 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

mostly coveted, Lippi found the monks' designs very difficult 
to realize. In this way Browning fritters away in coarse 
materialities, the ethereal instincts which lit up the souls of these 
men, who had no ideas out of the religious branch of their 
art, and who were never content except in making it the 
mirror for flashing upon the disc of this dark sphere the 
supernal glories of the next. 

One of the shorter pieces of the same series is the bishop 
ordering his tomb at St. Praxed's church, a portrait which has 
been praised by Ruskin, as evincing Browning's great famili- 
arity with the middle ages, and his skill in using this know- 
ledge to vitalize an ecclesiastical dignitary of the renaissance. 
But here the incongruity of the poet's notion with the Catholic 
idea is more startlingly manifest. For who can fancy a Roman 
bishop, retaining his belief, and within prospects of sudden 
death, talking in this fashion : — 

And then how I shall lie through centuries, 
And hear the blessed mutter of the mass, 
And see God made and eaten all day long, 
And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste 
Good strong thick stupifying incense-smoke. 

If Catholicism has more power at one time than another 
over its votaries, it is at the hour of death, when all the 
agencies of terror are put into operation, to absorb all the 
energies of the expiring soul. Yet it is at this hour that the 
bishop is represented as dwelling upon the charms of his mis- 
tress, the superb abundance of her breast, and her white marbly 
limbs, to his bastard sons, as a prelude to dividing between 
them the property he had clutched from the revenues of his 
see; an act of simony which would not be tolerated at Rome, 
and which, in any other country, would deprive the ecclesiastic 
committing it, of the last rites of the Church, including Catholic 
burial. Had Browning represented this Roman bishop in the 
flush of health, painted with the beauty of the Greek mythology, 



. REALISTIC SCHOOL. 395 

and hungering after the lusts of the flesh j or had he set the 
prelate before us as a hardened sceptic on his death-bed, 
treating religion' as a mockery, whatever might have been 
its truthfulness, the picture would have been consistent with 
itself. But the incongruity lies here, that while he represents 
the prelate as a devout believer in his own creed, he makes 
him perform acts in violent antagonism with its dictates ; and 
sends him out of the world executing a deed of no effect in 
the eye of the pontifical law, beyond consigning his soul to ever- 
lasting perdition. If Ruskin vouches for Browning's know- 
ledge of religious mediaevalism, who is to vouch for Ruskin's ? 
For it is clear that both critic and poet were writing here upon 
a subject which they could not appreciate, and which they little 
understood. 

The objectivity of Browning's mind is nowhere so much at 
discount, as when he attempts to deal with religious convic- 
tions, whether past or present, as these arise from subjective 
elements far beyond his ken; and he lacks the power of 
tracking to its sources that emotional glow which kindles them 
into enthusiasm. Hence his own religious views have no philo- 
sophical background, and he can give no further account of 
them than what might be given by the dullest thinker of the 
age ; while his representation of the religious views of others is 
nothing else than such a caricature of the outward form as out- 
rages their inner spirit and vitality. This subject is treated by 
Browning in two visions, entitled " Christmas Eve" and "Easter 
Day," through the first of which we arrive at the stupendous 
idea that God being a pure spirit ought to be worshipped in 
simplest fashion ; and by the last, at the equally startling result 
that on judgment-day, men will be condemned to cast in 
their lot with whatever phantoms they followed in this life, and 
that none can enter heaven but those whose hearts have been 
lit up by pure unselfish love. However poetical might be the 
framework by which such views are inculcated, the views 
themselves are only patchwork impressions derived from the 



396 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

blunt instincts of the age modifying religious dogmas until they 
bring them within the appellation of common-sense Christianity. 
They are neither profound, recondite, nor original, but very 
commonplace ; and just because they are commonplace, the 
poet has courted popularity by according to them poetic expres- 
sion. After " Paracelsus " and " Sordello," something was needed 
to propitiate the intelligence of the age, and accordingly we 
find " Christmas Eve " and "Easter Day " arranged sandwich- 
like between these two productions in the form of a sop to the 
most popular religious party in England. 

Nor is the poetic embellishment of these views so imposing 
as to make up for their lack of boldness or originality. That 
of " Easter Day " hardly contains a line I could select as 
choice. The poet is caught wrestling with himself about 
doubt, Christ, the difficulty of belief, when lo ! he is aroused by 
the sight of judgment itself, and the blue vault above him rapt 
in flame, with magazines of sulphur and other engines of com- 
bustion, ready to make a bonfire of the earth. Then occurs the 
conversation between the poet and the voice, which ends in the 
poet, after selecting in succession the world, nature, and art, 
throwing in his lot with love, and being very comfortably ad- 
mitted into heaven. Nothing to my mind than this could be 
more puerile. But a certain class of critics were in ecstasies. 
" Here," they exclaimed, " Mr. Browning admits the doctrine 
of the Incarnation ; there, that of posthumous rewards and 
punishments." After this, there could not be a doubt that 
he was not only a deep thinker, bat a great poet. 

In " Christmas Eve/' the poetic framework is more artistic 
in construction, and displays powers of graphic delineation of 
no common order. The picture of the dissenting chapel and 
the people assembling for worship, though reminding us too 
much of the Ingoldsby Legends, appears to have been drawn 
from personal experience. The poet under the influence of 
the preaching falls asleep, and after meeting with a lunar rain- 
bow, and fancying he recognises God in nature, is transported 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 397 

in succession to Rome, where he sees the pompous ceremonies 
of the Latin Church under the dome of St. Peter's • and to 
Gottingen, where he listens to the exposition of a German pro- 
fessor in goggle spectacles, who attempts to prove Christ a 
mythical embodiment of certain heroic qualities, all very well 
for humanity to aim at as its ideal, but too perfect ever to 
have been a living reality. These scenes are sketched with 
the same attempt at grotesque facetiousness, and terminate in 
a still more assured impression of their inadequacy to satisfy 
an immortal mind. The dreamer is then aroused from his 
lethargy by a thump of the preacher, and he is obliged to ac- 
knowledge that worshipping God according to the fashion of 
these simple folk whom he first scorned, is the most effective 
way of paying tribute to the divinity. Thus the poet takes us 
round the world, to show that the simplest form of dissent 
ought to furnish the most congenial worship to a devout mind, 
and that religious culture or rational inquiry may very properly 
be discarded for aesthetic blindness and theological ignorance. 
Browning, then, can hardly be taken as a deep thinker in 
religious matters, or the exponent of a lofty spirituality. With 
him, we get no farther than Jeremiah Bunting's commentaries 
and Whitefield's doxology. He falls behind the age in his 
attempt to lead it. He has no solution of the theological 
puzzle beyond that of the most illiterate of his countrymen. 
As a poetic seer, therefore, Browning has little claim on our 
consideration. 

" The Ring and the Book," which is regarded as our poet's 
masterpiece, is a compound of his worst defects and best excel- 
lences. Prolixity unendurable ; deserts of waste commonplace \ 
jagged metre, which seems as if ordinary prose had been cut up 
at random into lines ten syllables each; order and natural 
sequence utterly paralysed in the treatment of the story ;— such 
are the blotches of the piece, which are, however, frequently 
relieved by arch humour, pungent description half ludicrous and 
half pathetic, life-like crayoning of character, where the mind's 



398 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

features, at all events, are sculptured with the minuteness of a 
photograph, along with dashing sketches of melo-dramatic situ- 
ations, where the actors are skilfully grouped, and their feelings 
forcibly delineated. But of passion in its quieter depths, of human 
nature in its higher and unspasmodic moods, we get no glimpse 
whatever. The tale itself is ghastly, and the characters more 
fit for some walhalla, or itinerant Chamber of Horrors, than for 
a story aspiring to a permanent niche in English literature. 
Such a niche I feel certain in their present form they will not 
receive. But could the tale, as it easily might, by the mere with- 
drawal of its prosaic parts, be compressed within one-fourth of 
its present bulk, and disentangled from its present confused 
skein of narrative, it might hold its own against any poetic 
novel of a similar class, as a work of permanent interest. 

The simple outlines of the story which Browning takes up 
four volumes to narrate, may be disposed of almost in as many 
sentences. Count Guido Franceschini, a meagre noble on 
the wrong side of forty-five, attached to the fortunes of a 
cardinal at Rome, seeks to relieve his shattered estate by an 
advantageous marriage, and retire into the country. Pietro and 
Violante, an elderly couple in the Count's neighbourhood, have 
a foster child, Pompilia, the offspring of a bawd, and surrepti- 
tiously introduced to the world as their own, in order to save 
a small life estate, which would otherwise lapse into the hands 
of strangers. The youth of Pompilia, being only thirteen, her 
beauty, the possession of an unencumbered property, was the 
bait at which the Count snapped ; but the crafty pair who landed 
him, were hoodwinked in return ; for they found the Count had 
nothing but his title, and that instead of a munificent provision 
for themselves and Pompilia at his house at Arezzo, they got 
nothing but starvation fare, meagre soup, contumelious treat- 
ment, and stale candle ends. An explosion under these 
circumstances naturally takes place. Pietro and Violante, 
leaving their lamb to be kicked about at the will and pleasure 
of her husband, fly back to Rome, where, in order to spite the 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 399 

Count, they turn the presumed dowry of Pompilia into smoke, 
by circulating the rumour that his wife Was no child of 
theirs, but the chance offspring of prostitution. The arrival of 
this news at Arezzo only subjects Pompilia to worse treatment, 
which at length becomes so intolerable that she also escapes 
at night-fall, under the protection of a priest, Caponsacchi, and, 
in company with her confidante, makes the best of her way to 
Rome. The pair are overtaken at the last stage of the journey by 
the husband, who surprises the wife asleep in an inn, with Capon- 
sacchi in lay clothes standing guard outside, and gives the two 
in charge to a commissary of police, which leads to the trial of 
the accused before a tribunal in Rome. Pompilia is sent to a 
convent of the Convertites, a few miles from the villa of Pietro 
and Violante, and the Canon, Caponsacchi, to exile at Civita 
Vecchia, some forty miles from the same spot. Pompilia, 
however, being advanced in pregnancy, is allowed to return in 
a few months to the house of her foster parents, where she is 
delivered of a son. The Count, in his country house at Arezzo, 
some hundred miles distant, not liking the posture of affairs, 
and imagining a liaison still carried on between Pompilia and 
Caponsacchi at the house of Pietro and Violante, stimulates four 
of his workpeople to aid him in a murderous attack upon the 
parties, which is made'in the dead hour of the night, on Christmas 
eve. Pietro had hardly returned to his house from the usual mid- 
night mass, when a tap was heard at the door, from the bravos 
outside, who used Caponsacchi's name to effect an entrance. 
They found inside three of the principal actors, the elderly 
couple, Pietro and Violante, whom they slew on the spot, and 
Pompilia, whom they thought they had despatched, but whom 
they left with a six-clear-days' lease of life. Thus, by a special 
disposition of providence, Pompilia was enabled by a death-bed 
deposition to vindicate her own innocence and that of Capon- 
sacchi, and insure the conviction of the assassins, who were 
brought to trial immediately after the murder, and were, after 
appeal to the Pope, condemned, — the Count to decapitation, 



400 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

and his accomplices to the gallows. Such is a succinct draught 
of the story which Browning takes up nearly twenty thousand 
lines to make palpable to the comprehension of his readers. The 
" Excursion" is a lengthy poem, but it only takes up one-fourth 
of the space, and the fate of four dozen distinct personages is 
exhibited in it. Besides, the poet has given us his theories of 
morals, of religion, and of nature, in connection with his charac- 
ters, and, in fact, only puts these forward as the vehicle for the 
representation of such theories. But Browning deals with no 
theories of any kind, and strictly confines himself to the story, 
the simple telling of which constitutes the pith and marrow of 
four portly octavo volumes. This is leaving the prolixity of the 
mere novel writer far behind. The great advantage which 
poetry possesses over prose consists in condensation — in saying 
a great deal in a very little compass. But Browning seems to 
think that the peculiar merit of poetry is in saying a very little 
in a very great compass. 

How so simple a story could be spun out to such an enormous 
extent might perplex ingenuous readers, who, perhaps, may not 
be aware that a tale can be told three or four times over, each 
recital being made from a different stand-point, and revealing 
some new phase of the case imperfectly developed before* 
First, we have the story extracted out of the Roman archives, and 
the way in which the poet intends to deal with it, submitted to 
the consideration of the British public. Then we get the 
vulgar gossip of Rome about it, split into two portions, according 
as folks espouse one side or the other. But this is not sufficient 
for Browning, who gives his readers a third version of the story, 
according to 

What the superior social section, 
or the aristocracy of Rome, think about it :^— 

In person of some man of quality, 

Who, breathing musk from lace-work and brocade, 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 401 

His solitaire amid the flow of frill, 
Powdered peruke on nose, and bag at back, 
And cane dependent from the ruffled wrist, — 
Harangues in silvery and selectest phrase 
'Neath wax-lights in a glorified saloon, 
Where mirrors multiply the girandole : 
Courting the approbation of no mob 
But Eminence This and All Illustrious That, 
Who take snuff softly, range in well-bred ring, 
Card-table-quitters for observance sake, 
Around the argument, the rational word — 
Still, spite its weight and worth, a sample speech, 
How quality dissertated on the case.* 

Next, we have the Counf s defence of himself at the trial, 
followed by that of Caponsacchi and Pompilia, — whose depo- 
sitions are read — on the other side. After the principals come 
their advocates, Dominus Hyacinthus d'Archangelis for the 
Count, and pious Doctor Bottinius for the lady. For a poet 
is not supposed to know, that the prisoner's mouth, when he has 
an advocate, is hermetically sealed. But, in order to swell out 
the book, the Count is not only permitted to speak through 
Hyacinthus, but to make a second elaborate speech in his own 
defence. After the appeal to the Pope, Innocent XII., has col- 
lapsed, — who also favours the reader at great length with his view 
of this bloody piece of business — the whole is wound up with the 
execution and the last dying words of the assassins, the sermon 
preached upon the occasion by a certain notable friar, who took 
for his text, " God is truth, and every man a liar/' and the annota- 
tions and reflections of Dominus Hyacinthus and Bottinius upon 
their management of the prosecution and defence, and upon the 
sequel of the entire business. The poet then sings his pcean, 
and retires with the air of a man who has established his repu- 
tation. But as the poet has taken such liberties with the time 
of his readers, it is to be feared that Time in the abstract will 
take corresponding liberties with him. Performances which 

* Vol. i., p. 49. 

26 



402 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

take up so much visual space in bulk have little chance of occu- 
pying permanent space in the eyes of posterity. It is very 
desirable for a poet to absorb his facts in immensity, but when 
he fills immensity with his facts that is quite another thing. 

The prolixity of Browning in modelling the general features 
of the story strangely contrasts with the compression of thought 
he displays in particular parts of it. Indeed, in some of his 
descriptions, the ideas are so melted down to realize the most 
compact solidity of expression, that we are reminded of the 
force our language exhibited when it sprang into life, Minerva- 
like, armed and accoutred, from the brain of the Elizabethan 
dramatists. Thus, in the fewest possible words, Guido and his 
accomplices are conjured up before us as they entered upon 
their work of assassination : — 

It was eve, 
The second of the year, and oh so cold ! 
Ever and anon there flittered through the air 
A snow-flake, and a scanty couch of snow 
Crusted the grass-walk and the garden-mould. 
All was grave, silent, sinister, — when, ah? 
Glimmeringly did a pack of were-wolves pad 
The snow, those flames were Guido's eyes in front, 
And all five found and footed it, the track, 
To where a threshold-streak of warmth and light 
Betrayed the villa door with life inside ; 
While an inch outside were those blood-bright eyes 
And black lips wrinkling o'er the flash of teeth, 
And tongues that lolled — oh God, that madest man ! 
They parleyed in their language. Then one whined — 
That was the policy and master-stroke — 
Deep in his throat whispered what seemed a name — 
" Open to Caponsacchi," Guido cried, 
" Gabriel ! " ciied Lucifer at Eden's gate. 
Wide as a heart, opened the door at once, 
Showing the joyous couple and their child, 
The two weeks' mother, to the wolves, the wolves 
To them.* 

* "The Ring and the Book," vol. i., p. 32. 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 403 

And, again, according to the aristocratic way of looking at 
it:— 

The five proceed in a body, reach the place — 
Pietro's by the Paolina, silent, lone, 
And stupefied by the propitious snow, — 
At one in the evening : knock : a voice, " Who's there ?" 
" Friends with a letter from the priest your friend." 
At the door straight smiles old Violante's self. 
She falls ; her son-in-law stabs through and through. 
Reaches thro' her at Pietro ; — " With your son 
" This is the way to settle suits, good sire." 
* * * * * * 

He presently got his portion and lay still. 
And last, Pompilia rushes here and there, 
Like a dove among lightnings in her brake, 
Falls also.* 

The vulgar who espouse the part of the Count give their 
view even in more forcible language : — 

, "Giuseppe Caponsacchi," Guido cried, 
And open flew the door : enough again. 
Vengeance, you know, burst like a mountain- wave 
That holds a monster in it, over the house, 
And wiped its filthy four walls free again, 
With a wash of hell-fire, — father, mother, wife, 
Killed them all, bathed his name clean in their blood, t 

Pompilia is made to state her own feelings on the occasion 
with all the fervour of passion : — 

It was the name of him I sprang to meet, 

When came the knock, the summons, and the end. 

" My great heart, my strong hand are back again," 

I would have sprung to these, beckoning across 

Murder and Hell, gigantic and distinct, 

O, the threshold posted to exclude me heaven. % 



Tertiam Quid," vol. ii., p. 60. + "Half Rome,' vol. i., p. 149. 
% "Pompilia," vol. iii., p. 87. 



404 ESTIMATE OF MODERN EAGLISH POETS. 

The feelings of Pompilia when dying and reviewing her 
brief life, strike across all this harsh dissonance like a strain 
of mournful music, drenching us with pathos : — 



One cannot judge 
Of what has been the ill or well of life 
The day that one is dying, — sorrows change 
Into not altogether sorrow-like ; 
I do see strangeness but scarce misery 
Now it is over, and no danger more. 
My child is safe ; there seems not so much pain. 
It comes, most like, that I am just absolved, 
Purged of the past, the foul in me washed fair ; 
One cannot both have and not have, you know, 
Being right now, I am happy, and colour things. 
Yes, everybody that leaves life sees all 
Softened and bettered : so with other sights : 
To me at least was never evening yet 
But seemed far beautifuller than its day. 
For past is past * 

Pompilia' s last thoughts are very naturally directed to the 
future of her infant son, whom she supposes, when grown up 
to man's estate, to be curious as to his mother : — 

And if he asks " what was my mother like ? " 
People may answer " like girls of seventeen." 
And how can he but think of this and that, 
Lucias, Marias, Sofias, who titter or blush 
When he regards them as such boys may do ? 
Therefore I wish some one will please to say, 
I looked already old, though I was young ; 
Do I not — say if you are by to speak — 
Look nearer twenty ? No more like, at least, 
Girls who look arch or redden when boys laugh 
Than the poor virgin that I used to know 
At our street-corner in a lonely niche, — 
The babe that sat upon her knees, broke off, — 
Thin white-glazed clay, you pitied her the more : 
She, not the gay ones, always got my rose.+ 

* "Pompilia," vol. iii. , p. 17. + Ibid, p. 4. 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 405 

There is also something very sad in the touching simplicity 
with which the circumstances are alluded to which determined 
the choice of Pompilia's son's name. She herself had received 
five names at her christening, Francesca, Camilla, Vittoria, 
Angelica, Pompilia. But these had been of little use to her. 
Her son will grow up without knowing who his father or 
mother was, besides having 

As good too as no family, no name, 

Not even poor old Pietro's name, nor hers, 

Poor kind unwise Violante, since it seems 

They must not be my parents any more. 

That is why something put it in my head 

To call the boy " Gaetano," — no old name, 

For sorrow's sake ; I looked up to the sky 

And took a new saint to begin anew ; 

One who has only been made saint — how long ? 

Twenty-five years : so, carefuller, perhaps, 

To guard a name-sake than those old saints grow, 

Tired out by this time, — see my own five saints !* 

Pompilia is drawn with a character of child-like simplicity, 
which she preserves to the end, and which fully entitles her to 
a distinct niche among feminine poetic creation : — 

All the seventeen years, 
Not once did a suspicion visit me, 
How very different a lot is mine 
From any other woman's in the world. 
The reason must be, 'twas by step and step 
It got to grow so terrible and strange : 
Then strange woes stole on tiptoe, as it were, 
Into my neighbourhood and privacy, 
Sat down where I sat, laid them where I lay ; 
And I was found familiarized with fear 
When friends broke in, held up a torch and cried — 
' ' Why, you, Pompilia, in the cavern thus ! 
' ' How comes that arm of yours about a wolf? 
"And the soft length, — lies in and out your feet, 
" And laps you round the knee, — a snake it is. " + 

* " Pompilia," vol. hi., p. 6. t Ibid. 



406 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

But all Pompilia's goodness must have sprung from nature, 
or her five guardian saints must have taken particular 
care that she should extract nothing but virtue out of the 
poisonous ground in which she had taken root ; for her putative 
mother, Violante, was one of the most crafty of her sex, and 
her natural mother one of the drabs of Rome. The history of 
a life is struck off in a few words, as introductory to the 
bargain which consigns the infant to Violante. The real 
mother was 

One of those women that abound in Rome, 

Whose needs oblige them eke out one pure trade 

By another vile one : Her ostensible work 

Was washing clothes, out in the open air, 

At the cistern by Citorio ; but true trade — 

Whispering to idlers, when they stopped and praised 

The ancles she let liberally shine 

In kneeling at the slab by the fountain side, 

That there was plenty more to criticise 

At home, that eve, i 5 the house where candle blinked 

Decorously above, and all was done 

I' the holy fear of God, and cheap beside. 

Violante now, had seen this woman wash, 

Noticed and envied her propitious shape, 

Tracked her home to her house-top, noted too, 

And now was come to tempt her, and propose 

A bargain far more shameful than the first 

Which trafficked her virginity away 

For a melon and three pauls, at twelve years old. 

Five minutes' talk with this poor child of Eve, 

Struck was the bargain, business at an end — 

" Then, six months hence, that person whom you trust, 

" Comes, fetches whatsoever babe it be ; 

' ' I keep the price and secret, you the babe, 

" Paying beside for mass to make all straight."* 

But Violante's stratagems did not stop with defrauding, by 
means of this putative daughter, the heirs of the estate; she 
must go further — 

* " Giuseppe Caponsacchi, " vol. ii., p. 8. 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 407 

She who had caught one fish, could make that catch 

A bigger still, in angler's policy. 

So with an angler's mercy for the bait 

Her minnow was set wriggling on its barb 

And tossed to the mid-stream ; that is, this grown girl 

With the great eyes and bounty of black hair, 

And first crisp youth that tempts a jaded taste, 

Was whisked i' the way of a certain man, who snapped. * 

This of course was 

Count Guido Franceschini, the Aretine, 
Descended of an ancient house, though poor, 
A beak-nosed, bushy-bearded, black-haired lord, 
Lean, pallid, low of stature, yet robust, t 

The two parties, after the marriage, went to live in the 
Count's house at Arezzo, and make each other happy. The 
explosive indignation of the elderly couple on discovering the 
wealth and style of the man they had thus entrapped was mere 
smoke in the air, is not without a spice of humour, arising 
rather out of the raciness of the description than the intention 
of the author, who in his picture is strictly true to nature : — 

The first week, 
And fancy strikes fact and explodes in full. 
" This," shrieked the Comparini, "this the Count, 
" The palace, the signorial privilege, 
" The pomp and pageantry were promised us ? 
' ' For this have we exchanged our liberty, 
" Our competence, our darling of a child ? 
" To house as spectres in a sepulchre 
" Under this black stone heap, the street's disgrace, 
' ' Grimmest as that is of the gruesome town, 
" And here pick garbage on a pewter plate, 
" Or cough at verjuice dripped from earthenware ? 
" Oh, via Vittoria! oh the other place 
' ' I' the Pauline, did we give you up for this ? 
" Where's the foregone housekeeping, good and gay, 

* "Half Rome," vol. i., p. 89. t Vol. i., p. 41. 



408 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

"The neighbourliness, the companionship, 

"The treat and feast when holydays came round, 

" The daily feast that seemed no treat at all, 

' ' Called common by the uncommon fools we were ? 

" Even the sun that used to shine at Rome, 

" Where is it ? Robbed, and starved, and frozen too. 

" We will have justice, justice if there be ! " 

Did not they shout, did not the town resound ? 

Guido's old lady-mother Beatrice, 

Who since her husband, Count Tommaso's death, 

Had held sole sway i' the house — the doited crone, 

Slow to acknowledge, curtsey, and abdicate, — 

Was recognised of true novercal type, 

Dragon and devil. His brother Girolamo 

Came next in order : priest was he ? The worse ! 

No way of winning him to leave his mumps 

And help the laugh against old ancestry 

And formal habits long since out of date, 

Letting his youth be patterned on the mode 

Approved of where Violante laid down law. 

Or did he brighten up by way of change ? 

Dispose himself for affability ? 

The malapert, too complaisant by half 

To the alarmed young novice of a bride ! 

Let him go buzz, betake himself elsewhere, 

Nor singe his fly-wings in the candle-flame ! 

Four months' probation of this purgatory, 

Dog-snap and cat- claw, curse and counterblast, 

The devil's self had been sick of his own din ; 

And Pietro, after trumpeting huge wrongs 

At church and market-place, pillar and post, 

Square's corner, street's end, now the palace-step, 

And now the wine-house bench — while, on her side, 

Violante up and down was voluble 

In whatsoever pair of ears would perk, 

From goody, gossip, cater-cousin and sib, 

Curious to peep at the inside of things, 

And catch in the act pretentious poverty 

At its wits' end to keep appearance up, 

Make both ends meet ; — nothing the vulgar loves 

Like what this couple pitched them right and left ; — 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 409 

Then their worst done that way, they struck tent, marched ; — 

Renounced their share o' the bargain, flung what dues 

Guido was bound to pay in Guido's face, 

Left their heart's-darling, treasure of the Twain, 

And so forth, the poor inexperienced bride, 

To her own devices, bade Arezzo rot, 

And the life Signorial, and sought Rome once more.* 

The Count, however, has his version of the bargain, and 
thinks he was the dupe, not them ; for they obtained his rank 
and state, he nothing but the child of a common strumpet to 
wife : — 

If what I gave in barter, style and state, 

And all that hangs to Franceschinihood 

Were worthless, — why, society goes to ground, 

Its rules are idiot's rambling. Honour of birth, — 

If that thing has no value, cannot buy 

Something with value of another sort, 

You've no reward nor punishment to give 

I' the giving or the taking honour. Straight 

Your solid fabric, pinnacle to base, 

Comes down a-clatter like a house of cards. + 

The proper way of looking at the transaction was that both 
hoodwinked the other, and got well served out for their pains. 
The matrimonial market may find its general features imaged in 
the following statement of a special case : — 

Which bird o' the brace 
Decoyed the other into clap-net ? Who 
Was fool, who knave ? neither, and both, perchance. 
There was a bargain mentally proposed 
On each side, straight, and plain, and fair enough ; 
Mind knew its own mifcd : but when mind must speak, 
The bargain have expression in plain terms, 
There was the blunder incident to words, 
And in the clumsy process, fair turned foul. 

* "Half Rome," vol. i., p. 99. 

f "Count Guido Franceschini," vol. ii., p. 91. 



410 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

The straight backbone-thought of the crooked speech, 

Were just. " I, Guido, truck my name and rank 

" For so much money, and youth, and female charms ; " 

" We, Pietro and Violante, give our child 

" And wealth to you for a rise i' the world thereby." 

Such naked truth, while chambered in the brain, 

Shocks no wise : walk it forth by way of tongue, — 

Out on the cynical unseemliness ! 

Hence was the need, on either side, of a lie 

To serve as decent wrappage ; so Guido gives 

Money for money, — and they, bride for groom, 

Having, he, not a doit, they, not a child 

Honestly theirs, but this poor waif and stray. 

According to the words, each cheated each ; 

But in the inexpressive barter of thoughts, 

Each did give and did take the thing designed, 

The rank on this side, and the cash on that, — 

Attained the object of the traffic ; so 

The way o' the world, the daily bargain struck 

In the first market ! 

******* 

• Why, you know where the gist is of the Exchange : 
Each sees a profit, throws the fine words in. 
Don't be too hard o' the pair ! Had each pretence 
Been simultaneously discovered, stripped 
From off the body o' the transaction, just 
* * * * balance had been kept. 
No party blamed the other, so, starting fair, 
All subsequent fence of wrong returned by wrong, 
I' the matrimonial thrust and parry, at least, 
Had followed on equal terms. But, as it chanced, 
One party had the advantage, saw the cheat 
Of the other first, and kept its own concealed : 
And the luck o' the first discovery fell, beside, 
To the least adroit and self-possessed o' the pair. 
'Twas foolish Pietro and his wife saw first 
The nobleman was penniless, and screamed, 
" We are cheated ! "* 

The account Pompilia gives of her marriage is terrible in its 
* "Tertiam Quid," vol. ii., p. 23. 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 411 

simplicity, graphic in its individual details, and general in its 
application : — 

"I know that when Violante told me first 

The cavalier, — she meant to bring next morn, 

Whom I must also let take, kiss my hand, — 

Would be at San Lorenzo the same eve, 

And marry me, — which over, we should go 

Home, both of us, without him, as before ; 

And till she bade speak, I must hold my tongue, 

Such being the correct way with girl-brides, 

From whom one word would make a father blush ; — 

I know, I say, that when she told me this, 

— Well, I no more saw sense in what she said 

Than a lamb does in people clipping wool ; 

Only lay down and let myself be clipped. 

And when next day the cavalier, who came, 

* * proved Guido Franceschini, — old, 
And nothing like so tall as I myself, 
Hook-nosed, and yellow in a bush of beard, 
Much like a thing I saw on a boy's wrist, 
He called an owl, and used for catching birds ; — 
And when he took my hand and made a smile, — 
Why, the uncomfortableness of it all 
Seemed hardly more important in the case 
Than, — when one gives you, say, a coin to spend, — 
Its newness, or its oldness ; if the piece 
Weigh properly, and buy you what you wish, 
No matter whether you get grime or glare ! 
Men take the coin, return you grapes and figs. 
Here marriage was the coin, a dirty piece 
Would purchase me the praise of those I loved : 
About what else should I concern myself? "* 

The portrait of Pompilia herself is also sketched with a minute 
particularity, as if the artist-poet was executing a drawing from 
life in mezzotinto : — 

Her brow had not the right line, leaned too much, 
Painters would say ; they like the straight-up Greek : 

* " Pompilia," vol. iii., p. 19. 



412 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

This seemed bent somewhat with an invisible crown 
Of martyr and saint, not such as art approves. 
And how the dark orbs dwelt deep underneath, 
Looked out of such a sad sweet heaven on me ; — 
The lips compressed a little, came forward too, 
Careful for a whole world of sin and pain. * 

She is also represented as possessing a soul as perfect as her 
body, in language which makes the portrait a heirloom of the 
heart : — 

A faultless nature in a flawless form. 

* * * Oh turn aside, nor dare the blaze 

Of such a crown, such constellations, say, 

As jewels base thy front, humanity ! 

First, infancy pellucid as a pearl, 

Then childhood — stone which dew-drop at the first 

(An old conjecture) swells by dint of gaze, 

Blue from the sky, and turns to sapphire so : 

Yet both these gems eclipsed by last, and best, 

Womanhood, and wifehood opaline, 

With here and there a tint and hint of flame — 

Desire — the lapidary loves to find. 

The purity of Pompilia is well brought out by Caponsacchi , 
who, as a priest in the habit of celebrating mass and communi- 
cating daily, is thus made to associate the influence which she 
exercised over him with his sacred functions : — 

The glory, I say, 
And the beauty, I say, and splendour still say I, 
Who, a priest, trained to live my whole life long 
On beauty and splendour, solely at their source, 
God, — have thus recognized my food in one, 
You tell me, is fast dying while we talk, 
Pompilia. 

******** 
The snow-white soul that angels fear to take 
Untenderly.f 

* "Giuseppe Caponsacchi," vol. ii., p. 246. 
t Ibid, p. 166. 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 413 

Up to the time of meeting with Pompilia all Caponsacchi's 
thoughts were commonplace, but when he came under her 
influence 

Into another state, under new rule, 

I knew myself was passing swift and sure, 

Whereof the initiatory pang approached, 

Felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet 

As when the virgin-band, the victors chaste, 

Feel at the end the earthly garments drop, 

And rise with something of a rosy shame 

Into immortal nakedness : so I 

Lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill 

Into the ecstasy and out-throb pain.* 

And again, — 

That night and next day did her gaze endure, 
Burnt to my brain, as sunbeam thro' shut eyes, f 

But, notwithstanding this love, Caponsacchi avers : — 

I never touched her with my finger-tip, 
Except to carry her to the couch, that eve, 
Against my heart, beneath my head, bowed low, 
As we priests carry the paten. % 

But Pompilia, though weak and compassionate in suffering, 
is vividly introduced to us as transformed into a tigress, when 
overtaken by the Count on her last stage to Rome, whither 
she was fleeing with Caponsacchi. On this occasion, the 
commissary, with his officers, having secured the priest, in com- 
pany with the Count, burst into the chamber where Pompilia 
slept : — 

She woke, saw, sprang upright 
I' the midst, and stood as terrible as truth, 

* "Giuseppe Caponsacchi," vol. ii., p. 202. 
t Ibid, p. 180. % Ibid, p. 231. 

The " paten " is the plate upon which the host is laid at mass. 



414 ESTIMATE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

Sprang to her husband's side, caught at the sword 

That hung there useless, since they held each hand 

O' the lover, had disarmed him properly, 

And in a moment out flew the bright thing 

Full in the face of Guido, — but for help 

O' the guards who held her back and pinioned her 

With pains enough, she had finished you my tale 

With a flourish of red all round it, pinked her man 

Prettily ; but she fought them one to six. 

They stopped that, — but her tongue continued free : 

She spat forth such invective at her spouse, 

O'er-frothed him with such foam of murderer, 

Thief, pander, that the popular tide soon turned, — 

The favour of the very Sbirri, straight 

Ebbed from the husband, set towards his wife ; 

People cried "hands off, pay a priest respect," 

And "persecuting fiend ! " and "martyred saint ! " 

Began to pass from lip to lip.* 

The following is the very graphic account which Pompilia is 
made to give of the same transaction : — 

Then something like a white wave o' the sea 

Broke o'er my brain and buried me in sleep 

Blessedly, till it ebbed and left me loose, 

And where was I found but on a strange bed, 

In a strange room like hell, roaring with noise, 

Ruddy with flame, and filled with men, in front 

Whom but the man you call my husband, ay — 

Count Guido once more between heaven and me, 

For there my heaven stood, my salvation, yes — 

That Gaponsacchi, all my heaven of help, 

Helpless himself, held prisoner in the hands 

Of men who looked up in my husband's face 

To take the fate thence he should signify, 

Just as the way was at Arezzo : then, 

Not for my sake, but his who had helped me, — 

I sprang up, reached him with one bound, and seized 

The sword o' the felon, trembling at his side, 



"Half Rome," vol. i., p. 128. 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 415 



Fit creature of a coward, unsheathed the thing, 
And would have pinned him through the poison-bag 
To the wall, and left him there to palpitate, 
As you serve scorpions, but men interposed — 
Disarmed me, gave his life to him again 
That he might take mine and the other lives, 
And he has done so.* 

Caponsacchi gives a very graphic description of the same 
scene, which of its kind may fairly match with anything of the 
kind in our literature : — 

" Let myself lead the way — 
' ' Ere you arrest me, who am somebody, 
" And, as you hear, a priest and privileged, — 
" To the lady's chamber. I presume you — men 
"Expert, instructed how to find out truth, 
" Familiar with the guise of guilt. Detect 
" Guilt on her face when it meets mine, then judge 
" Between us and the mad dog howling there ! " 
Up we all went together, in they broke 
O' the chamber, late my chapel. There she lay, 
Composed as when I laid her, that last eve 
O' the couch, still, breathless, motionless, sleep's self, 
Wax- white, seraphic, saturate with the sun 
O' the morning that now flooded from the front, 
And filled the window with a light like blood. 
" Behold the prisoner, the adulteress." 
" And feigning sleep too ! seize, bind ! " Guido hissed. 

She started up, stood erect, face to face 
With the husband : back he fell, was buttressed there 
By the window all a-flame with morning red, 
He the black figure, the opprobrious blur 
Against all peace and joy, and light and life. 
" Away from between me and hell ! " she cried, 
" Hell for me, no embracing any more ! 
" I am God's ; I love God, God — whose knees I clasp, 
" Whose utterly most just award I take, 
" But fear no more love-making devils : hence ! " 

— 
* "The other Half Rome," vol. i., p. 216. 



416 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 



I may have made an effort to reach her side 

From where I stood i' the doorway, — any how, 

I found the arms, I wanted, pinioned fast, 

Was powerless in the clutch to left and right 

O' the rabble pouring in, rascality 

Enlisted, rampant on the side of hearth 

Home and the husband, — pay in prospect too ! 

They heaped themselves upon me. — "Ah, and him 

" Also you outrage ? Him, too, my sole friend, 

" Guardian, and saviour? That I baulk you of, 

" Since, — see how God can help at last and worst." 

She sprung at the sword that hung beside him, seized, 

Drew, brandished it, the sunrise burned for joy 

O' the blade ; "Die," cried she, "devil in God's name ! " 

Ah ! but they all closed round her twelve to one, 

— The unmanly men, no woman-mother made, 

Spawned somehow ! Death-white and disarmed she lay. 

No matter for the sword, her word sufficed 

To spike the coward through and through. He shook, 

Could only spit between his teeth.* 

Caponsacchi would have made short work of Guido, had the 
husband not avoided his gripe, at a respectable distance : — 

During this speech of that man, — well, I stood 
Away, as he managed, — still, I stood as near 
The throat of him, — with these, two hands, my own, 
As now I stand near yours, sir, — one quick spring, 
One great, good, satisfying gripe, and lo ! 
There had he lain abolished with his lie, 
Creation purged o' the miscreate, man redeemed 
A spittle wiped off from the face of God ! t 

How Pompilia escaped from Arezzo is detailed with 
characteristic minuteness : — 

And on a certain April evening, late 

V the month, this girl of sixteen, bride and wife 

Three years and over, — she who hitherto 

Had never taken twenty steps in Rome 

Beyond the church, pinned to her mother's gown, 

* "Giuseppe Caponsacchi," vol. ii., p. 226. f Ibid, p. 225. 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 417 

Nor, in Arezzo, knew her way through street, 

Except what led to the Archbishop's door, — 

Such an one rose up in the dark, laid hand 

On what came first, clothes and a trinket or two, 

Belongings of her own in the old day, — 

Stole from the side o' the sleeping spouse — who knows ? 

Sleeping perhaps, silent for certain, — slid 

Ghost-like from great dark room to great dark room, 

In through the tapestries and out again 

And onward, unembarrassed as a fate, 

Descended staircase, gained last door of all, 

Sent it wide open at first push of palm, 

And there stood, first time, last and only time, - 

At liberty, alone in the open street, — 

Unquestioned, unmolested found herself 

At the city gate, by Caponsacchi's side, 

Hope there, joy there, life and all good again, 

The carriage there, the convoy there, light there 

Broadening into a full blaze at Rome, 

And breaking small what long miles lay between ; 

Up she sprang, in he followed, they were safe !* 

The particulars of the flight are narrated by Caponsacchi, who 
makes the reader acquainted with every feature of the journey. 
Nothing could be more life-like or artistic than his account of 
the undertaking, which was attended with peril, as Rome was 
some two hundred miles distant from the Ogre's den at 
Arezzo : — 

At eve we heard the angelus : she turned — 

" I told you I can neither read nor write. 

" My life stopped with the play-time ; I will learn, 

" If I begin to live again. But you — 

' ' Who are a priest — wherefore do you not read 

" The service at this hour ? Read Gabriel's song, 

" The lesson, and then read the little prayer 

" To Raphael, proper for us travellers." 

I did not like that, neither, but I read. 

When we stopped at Foligno it was dark. 

* " The other Half Rome," vol. L, p. 212. 

27 



4i 8 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

The people of the post came out with lights : 

The driver said, — "This time to-morrow, may 

" Saints only help, relays continue good, 

" Nor robbers hinder, we arrive at Rome." 

I urged, " Why tax your strength a second night ? 

" Trust me ; alight here and take brief repose ! 

" We are out of harm's reach, past pursuit : go, sleep, 

" If but an hour ! I keep watch, guard the while 

" Here in the door- way." But her whole face changed, 

The misery grew again about her mouth, 

The eyes burned up from faintness, like the fawn's 

Tired to death in the thicket, when she feels 

The probing spear o' the huntsman. " Oh, no stay," 

She cried, in the fawn's cry, " on to Rome, on, — 

" Unless 'tis you who fear — which cannot be." 

We did go on all night ; but at its close 

She was troubled, restless, moaned low, talked at whiles 

To herself, her brow on quiver with the dream : 

Once, wide awake, she menaced, at arms' length, — 

W T aved away something : — "Never again with you, 

" My soul is mine, my body is my soul's ; 

" You and I are divided evermore 

" In soul and body : get you gone ! " Then I, — 

' ' Why, in my whole life I have never prayed ! 

" Oh, if the God, that only can, would help ! 

" Am I His priest, with power to cast out fiends ? 

" Let God arise, and all His enemies 

" Be scattered.* 

While Browning sticks to the facts of his story, his delinea- 
tions are striking, life-like, and artistic. At the outset he 
discards all mystery with regard to the sequel, and makes his 
public as wise as himself. If the reader, therefore, is carried 
through the first two volumes with a desire to learn more, the 
interest solely arises from the poet's graphic manner of narra- 
ting the leading incidents of the story. But when he gets to the 
advocates' speeches in the third volume, or to anything like 
general theorizing, the reader is drenched with commonplace 

* " Giuseppe Caponsacchi," vol. ii., p. 216. 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 419 

tirades in lop-sided metre, and closes the book through very 
weariness of the flesh. Let him fancy, if he can, the effect 
in the latter half of a story of two hundred of such doggerel 
lines as the following : — 

A gentlewoman lived in Smyrna once 

Virum et filium ex eo conception, who 

Both husband and her son begot by him, 

Killed, interfecerat, ex quo, because 

Vir filium suum perdiderat, her spouse 

Had been beforehand with her, killed her son, 

Matrimonii pri?ni, of a previous bed. 

Deinde accusata, then accused, 

Apud Dolabellam, before him that sat, 

Proconsul, nee duabw: ccedibus 

Contaminatam liberare, nor 

To liberate a woman doubly-dyed 

With murder, voluit, made he up his mind, 

Nee condemnare, nor to doom to death, 

yusto dolore impulsam, one impelled 

By just grief, sed remisit, but sent her up 

Ad Areopagtim, to the Hill of Mars.* 

The only excuse that can be assigned for this sort of thing is 
that the poet, in accordance with his plan of treatment, was 
bound to represent the case in every phase through which it 
passed. But it may easily be denied that Roman advocates, 
stupid though they be, could treat the case as if they were 
reading for the Court the prose translation of an Eton Latin 
grammar. Besides, the poet has nothing to do with any feature 
of a story, except such' as will both amuse and instruct his readers. 
He is bound to handle his materials so as to insure both. But 
in the greater portion of the latter half of the work, Browning 
appears bent upon doing neither. Persons jealous of the honour 
of English literature would, doubtless, urge him to discard 
most of the two last volumes as an excrescence, which serves no 
purpose except to disfigure what might otherwise be a fine per- 

* " Dominus Hyacinthus," vol. iii., p. 133. 



420 ESTIMA TE OF MODERN ENGLISH POETS. 

iormance. It is the duty of the critic to appeal to him to do so, 
not only that so short-lived an insect as man may be benefited 
by his labours, but for the credit of his own reputation. 

The qualities in which Mr. Browning excels are not those 
which belong to the highest rank of poetry. He is deficient in 
ideality, in lyrical sweetness and sublimity, in portraying the 
calmer passions, in the embodiment of quiet sensibility, and in 
that innate perception of material loveliness, which lifts the soul 
to the threshold of heaven, only to send it back to earth grasp- 
ing the emptiness of despair. Of architectonic skill in con- 
structing or unfolding a story, he knows nothing. If he moves 
the passions, it is by the erratic representation of visual fact. 
He knows the world thoroughly, and can reveal the secret 
springs of character so far as they are emblazoned in outside 
results, with the hand of a master. Give him also the general 
features of a story, and he will supply the minor incidents so 
skilfully that the whole will start into life again with the 
appearance of reality. But Browning seldom gets beyond the 
story itself. The phenomena of his subject, both material and 
spiritual, are depicted very vividly,. but these are rarely used as 
the steps of ascent to a higher order of things. He seldom 
attempts to generalize, because he has no philosophy, and as 
little theoretic religion. Hence, he never lifts his readers from 
the actual into the ideal, and if he resuscitates the past, it is only 
with the feelings of the present 

Browning's great forte is in the representation of selfish 
natures, in the embodiment of those lurking qualities, which, 
while hidden from the eye of the ordinary observer, constitute 
the main-spring of the man. But strange to say, this excel- 
lence is not displayed in his dramas where there was a peculiar 
field for its exercise, being completely overridden by his 
singular habit of unfolding a story upon some preconceived 
theory, only intelligible to himself. But in the " Ring and the 
Book," and in his " Men and Women," it appears to conspi- 
cuous advantage. Hence, though Browning cannot be said to 



REALISTIC SCHOOL. 421 

have enriched the life-blood of his age with any new thoughts, 
he has carved out for himself a particular department of his art, 
in which he may be said not so much to have surpassed his 
contemporaries as to have only thoroughly explored himself. 
He has unravelled the skein of complex motives. He has 
exhibited under a glass case the counteracting checks of feeling, 
volition, and intellect at work in the actions of great characters. 
He has displayed a wide sympathy with opposite poles of 
religious thought. He has dominated language by ideas, and 
realized the maximum amount of energy in the least compass of 
expression. It is owing to the strength derived from these 
various sources, that his descriptions, realistic though they 
be, and his characters, individual as they are, fully entitle Mr. 
Browning to a respectable place among the third-class poets of 
our literature. 



THE END. 



Watson & Hazell, Printers, London and Aylesbury. 






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